
Book 1 A :4 

CopyiightN'?__ 

COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT, 



ENGLISH MEN OF LETTERS 
EDITED Br JOHN MORLET 

CRABBE 



■j^^y^ 



ENGLISH MEN OF LETTERS 


CRABBE 


BY 


ALFRED AINGER 


i)r ^^^MM^yKi:.-;'^;* 


Neto gotk 


THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 


LONDON: MACMILLAN & CO., Ltd. 


1903 


yi// rights reserved 



Ifx 



h^" 



THE LIBRARY OF 
CONGRESS. 

Two Copies Receivec) 

SEP 11 »903 

y Copyiigm Entry 

CLASS <i2. XXc. N» 

COPY B. 



COPTEIQHT, 1903, 

By the MACMILLAN COMPANY. 



Set up, electrotyped, and published September, 1903. 



J. S. Gushing & Co. — Berwick. & Smith Co. 
Norwood, Mass., U.S.A. 



PREFATORY NOTE 

The chief, and almost sole, source of information 
concerning Crabbe is the Memoir by his son prefixed 
to the collected edition of his poems in 1834. Com- 
paratively few letters of Crabbe's have been pre- 
served : but a small and interesting series will be 
found in the "Leadbeater Papers" (1862), consisting 
of letters addressed to Mary Leadbeater, the daughter 
of Burke's friend, Eichard Shackleton. 

I am indebted to Mr. John Murray for kindly 
lending me many manuscript sermons and letters 
of Crabbe's and a set of commonplace books in 
which the poet had entered fragments of cancelled 
poems, botanical memoranda, and other miscellaneous 
matter. 

Of especial service to me has been a copy of 
Crabbe's Memoir by his son with abundant annota- 
tions by Edward FitzGerald, whose long intimacy with 
Crabbe's son and grandson had enabled him to illus- 
trate the text with many anecdotes and comments of 



vi PREFACE 

interest chiefly derived from those relatives. This 

volume has been most kindly placed at my disposal 

by Mr. W. Aldis Wright, FitzGerald's literary 

executor. 

Finally, I have once again to thank my old friend 

the Master of Peterhouse for his careful reading of 

my proof sheets. 

A. A. 

July 1903. 



CONTENTS 



CHAPTER I 

PAGE 

Early Life in Aldeburgh 1 



CHAPTER II 
Poverty in London . 18 

CHAPTER III 
Friendship with Burke 34 

CHAPTER IV 
Life at Belvoir Castle 65 

CHAPTER V 
In Suffolk again 71 

CHAPTER VI 
The Parish Begister 91 

CHAPTER VII 
The Borough 108 

CHAPTER VIII 

Tales 128 

vii 



viii CONTENTS 

CHAPTER IX 

PAGE 

Visiting in London 146 

CHAPTER X 
The Tales of the Hall 163 

CHAPTER XI 
Last Years at Trowbridge 184 

Index 205 



CRABBE 



CRABBE 

CHAPTER I 

EARLY LIFE IN ALDEBURGH 
(1754-1780) 

Two eminent English poets who must be reckoned 
moderns though each produced characteristic verse 
before the end of the eighteenth century, George 
Crabbe and William Wordsworth, have shared the 
common fate of those writers who, possessing a very 
moderate power of self-criticism, are apparently unable 
to discriminate between their good work and their bad. 
Both have suffered, and still suffer, in public estimation 
from this cause. The average reader of poetry does 
not care to have to search and select for himself, and is 
prone summarily to dismiss a writer (especially a poet) 
on the evidence of his inferior productions. Words- 
worth, by far the greater of the two poets, has survived 
the effects of his first offence, and has grown in popu- 
larity and influence for half a century past. Crabbe, 
for many other reasons that I shall have to trace, has 
declined in public favour during a yet longer period, 
and the combined bulk and inequality of his poetry 
have permanently injured him, even as they injured 
his younger contemporary. 

Widely as these two poets differed in subjects and 



2 CRABBE [chap. 

methods, they achieved kindred results and played an 
equally important part in the revival of the human and 
emotioual virtues of poetry after their long eclipse 
under the shadow of Pope and his school. Each was 
primarily made a poet through compassion for what 
" man had made of man," and through a concurrent and 
sympathetic influence of the scenery among which he 
was brought up. Crabbe was by sixteen years Words- 
worth's senior, and owed nothing to his inspiration. In 
the form, and at times in the technique of his verse, 
his controlling master was Pope. For its subjects he 
was as clearly indebted to Goldsmith and Gray. But 
for Tlie Deserted Village of the one, and The Elegy of the 
other, it is conceivable that Crabbe, though he might 
have survived as one of the " mob of gentlemen '^ who 
imitated Pope ^' with ease," would never have learned 
where his true strength lay, and thus have lived as one 
, of the first and profoundest students of Tlie Annals of 
the Poor. For The Village^ one of the earliest and not 
least valuable of his poems, was written (in part, at 
least) as early as 1781, while Wordsworth was yet a 
child, and before Cowper had published a volume. In 
yet another respect Crabbe was to work hand in hand 
with Wordsworth. He does not seem to have held 
definite opinions as to necessary reforms in what 
Wordsworth called "poetic diction." Indeed he was 
hampered, as Wordsworth was not, by a lifelong ad- 
herence to a metre — the heroic couplet — with which 
this same poetic diction was most closely bound up. 
He did not always escape the effects of this contagion, 
but in the main he was delivered from it by what I 
have called a first-hand association with man and 
nature. He was ever describing what he had seen and 



I.] EARLY LIFE IN ALDEBURGH 3 

studied with his own eyes, and the vocabulary of the 
bards who had for generations borrowed it from one 
another failed to supply him with the words he needed. 
The very limitations of the first five-and-twenty years 
of his life passed in a small and decaying seaport 
were more than compensated by the intimacy of his 
acquaintance with its inhabitants. Like Wordsworth 
he had early known love and sorrow " in huts where 
poor men lie." 

Wordsworth's fame and influence have grown 
steadily since his death in 1850. Crabbe's reputation 
was apparently at its height in 1819, for it was then, 
on occasion of his publishing his Tales of the Hall, that 
Mr. John Murray paid him three thousand pounds for 
the copyright of this work, and its predecessors. But 
after that date Crabbe's popularity may be said to have 
continuously declined. Other poets, with other and 
more purely poetical gifts, arose to claim men's atten- 
tion. Besides Wordsworth, as already pointed out, 
Scott, Byron, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley had found 
their various admirers, and drawn Crabbe's old public 
from him. It is the purpose of this little volume to 
inquire into the reasons why he is still justly counted 
a classic, and whether he has not, as Tennyson said of 
him, " a world of his own," still rich in interest and in 
profit for the explorer. 

Aldeburgh — or as it came to be more commonly 
spelled in modern times, Aldborough — is to-day a 
pleasant and quiet watering-place on the coast of 
Suffolk, only a few miles from Saxmundham, with 
which it is connected by a branch line of the Great 
Eastern Eailway. It began to be known for its fine 



4 CRABBE [CHAP. 

air and sea-bathing about the middle of the last 
century, and to-day possesses other attractions for 
the yachtsman and the golfer. But a hundred years 
earlier, when Crabbe was born, the town possessed 
none of these advantages and means of access, to 
amend the poverty and rough manners of its boating 
and fishing inhabitants. In the sixteenth and seven- 
teenth centuries Aldeburgh had been a flourishing port 
with a population able to provide notable aid in the 
hour of national danger. Successive Royal Charters 
had accorded to the town markets, with other im- 
portant rights and privileges. It had returned two 
members to Parliament since early in the days of 
Elizabeth, and indeed continued to do so until the 
Keform Bill of 1831. But, in common with Dunwich, 
and other once flourishing ports on the same coast, 
Aldeburgh had for its most fatal enemy, the sea. The 
gradual encroachments of that irresistible power had 
in the course of two centuries buried a large portion 
of the ancient Borough beneath the waves. Two 
existing maps of the town, one of about 1590, the 
other about 1790, show how extensive this devasta- 
tion had been. This cause, and others arising from 
it, the gradual decay of the shipping and fishing 
industries, had left the town in the main a poor and 
squalid place, the scene of much smuggling and other 
lawlessness. Time and the ocean wave had left only 
"two parallel and unpaved streets, running between 
mean and scrambling houses." Nor was there much 
relief, aesthetic or other, in the adjacent country, 
which was flat, marshy, and treeless, continually swept 
by northern and easterly gales. A river, the Aid, 
from which the place took its name, approached the 



I.] EARLY LIFE IN ALDEBURGH 6 

sea close to the town from the west, and then took a 
turn, flowing south, till it finally entered the sea at 
the neighbouring harbour of Orford. 

In Aldeburgh, on Christmas Eve 1754, George 
Crabbe was born. He came of a family bearing a 
name widely diffused throughout Norfolk and Suffolk 
for many generations. His father, after school-teaching 
in various parishes in the neighbourhood, finally settled 
down in his native place as collector of the salt duties, 
a post which his father had filled before him. Here 
as a very young man he married an estimable and 
pious widow, named Loddock, some years his senior, 
and had a family of six children, of whom George was 
the eldest. 

Within the limits of a few miles round, including 
the towns and villages of Slaughden, Orford, Parham, 
Beccles, Stowmarket, and Woodbridge, the first five- 
and-twenty years of the poet's life were spent. He 
had but slight interest in the pursuits of the inhabitants. 
His father, brought up among its fishing and boating 
interests, was something nautical in his ambitions, 
having a partnership in a fishing-boat, and keeping 
a yacht on the river. His other sons shared their 
father's tastes, while George showed no aptitude or 
liking for the sea, but from his earliest years evinced 
a fondness for books, and a marked aptitude for learn- 
ing. He was sent early to the usual dame-school, and 
developed an insatiable appetite for such stories and 
ballads as were current among the neighbours. George 
Crabbe, the elder, possessed a few books, and used to 
read aloud to his family passages from Milton, Young, 
and other didactic poets of the eighteenth century. 
Furthermore he took in a country magazine, which 



6 C 11 ABBE [chap. 

had a "Poet's Corner," always handed over to George 
for his sx)ecial benefit. The father, respecting these 
early signs of a literary bent in the son, sent him to a 
small boarding-school at Bungay in the same county, 
and a few years later to one of higher pretensions at 
Stowmarket, kept by a Mr. Eichard Haddon, a mathe- 
matical teacher of some repute, where the boy also 
acquired some mastery of Latin and acquaintance with 
the Latin classics. In his later years he was given 
(perhaps a little ostentatiously) to prefixing quotations 
from Horace, Juvenal, Martial, and even more recondite 
authors, to the successive sections of The Borough. But 
wherever he found books — especially poetry — he read 
them and remembered them. He early showed con- 
siderable acquaintance with the best English poets, 
and although Pope controlled his metrical forms, and 
something more than the forms, to the end of his 
life, he had somehow acquired a wide knowledge of 
Shakespeare, and even of such then less known poets 
as Spenser, Ealeigh, and Cowley. 

After some three years at Stowmarket — it now 
being settled that medicine was to be his calling — 
George was taken from school, and the search began 
in earnest for some country practitioner to whom he 
might be apprenticed. An interval of a few months 
was spent at home, during which he assisted his father 
at the office on Slaughden Quay, and in the year 1768, 
when he was still under fourteen years of age, a post 
was found for him in the house of a surgeon at 
Wickham-Brook, near Bury St. Edmunds. This prac- 
titioner combined the practice of agriculture on a 
small scale with that of physic, and young Crabbe 
had to take his share in the labours of the farm. The 



I.] EARLY LIFE IN ALDEBURGH 7 

result was not satisfactory, and after three years 
of this rough and uncongenial life, a more profitable 
situation was found with a Mr. Page of Woodbridge — 
the memorable home of Bernard Barton and Edward 
FitzGerald. Crabbe became Mr. Page's pupil in 1771, 
and remained with him until 1775. 

We have the authority of Crabbe's son and biog- 
rapher for saying that he never really cared for the 
profession he had adopted. What proficiency he 
finally attained in it, before he forsook it for ever, is 
not quite clear. But it is certain that his residence 
among the more civilised and educated inhabitants of 
Woodbridge was of the greatest service to him. He 
profited notably by joining a little club of young in en 
who met on certain evenings at an inn for discussion 
and mutual improvement. To this little society 
Crabbe was to owe one chief happiness of his life. 
One of its members, Mr. W. S. Levett, a surgeon (one 
wonders if a relative of Samuel Johnson's protege), 
was at this time courting a Miss Brereton, of Fram- 
lingham, ten miles away. Mr. Levett died young in 
1774, and did not live to marry, but during his brief 
friendship with Crabbe was the means of introducing 
him to the lady who, after many years of patient 
waiting, became his wife. In the village of Great 
Parham, not far from Pramlingham, lived a Mr. Tovell, 
of Parham Hall, a substantial yeoman, farming his 
own estate. With Mr. and Mrs. Tovell and their 
only child, a daughter, lived an orphan niece of Mr. 
Tovell's, a Miss Sarah Elmy, Miss Brereton's bosom- 
friend, and constant companion. Mr. Levett had in 
consequence become the friend of the Tovell family, 
and conceived the desire that his young friend, 



8 CEABBE [chap. 

Crabbe, should be as blessed as himself. " George," 
he said, " you shall go with me to Farham ; there is a 
young lady there who would just suit you ! " Crabbe 
accepted the invitation, made Mr. Tovell's acquaint- 
ance, and promptly fell in love with Mr. Tovell's niece. 
The poet, at that time, had not yet completed his 
eighteenth year. 

How soon after this first meeting George Crabbe 
proposed and was accepted, is not made clear, but he 
was at least welcomed to the house as a friend and 
an admirer, and his farther visits encouraged. His 
youth and the extreme uncertainty of his prospects 
could not well have been agreeable to Mr. and Mrs. 
Tovell, or to Miss Elmy's widowed mother who 
lived not far away at Beccles, but the young lady 
herself returned her lover's affection from the first, 
and never faltered. The three following years, during 
which Crabbe remained at Woodbridge, gave him the 
opportunity of occasional visits, and there can be no 
doubt that apart from the fascinations of his " Mira," 
by which name he proceeded to celebrate her in 
occasional verse, the experience of country life and 
scenery, so different from that of his native Aldeburgh, 
was of great service in enlarging his poetical outlook. 
Great Parham, distant about five miles from Sax- 
mundham, and about thirteen from Aldeburgh, is at 
this day a village of great rural charm, although a 
single-lined branch of the Great Eastern wanders 
boldly among its streams and cottage gardens through 
the very heart of the place. The dwelling of the 
Tovells has many years ago disappeared — an entirely 
new hall having risen on the old site; but there 
stands in the parish, a few fields away, an older 



I.] EARLY LIFE IN ALDEBURGH 9 

Parliam Hall; — to-day a farm-house, dear to artists, of 
singular picturesqueness, surrounded and even washed 
by a deep moat, and shaded by tall trees — a haunt, 
indeed, " of ancient peace." The neighbourhood of 
this old Hall, and the luxuriant beauty of the inland 
village, so refreshing a contrast to the barrenness and 
ugliness of the country round his native town, enriched 
Crabbe's mind with many memories that served him 
well in his later poetry. 

In the meantime he was practising verse, though as 
yet showing little individuality. A Lady's Magazine of 
the day, bearing the name of its publisher, Mr. Wheble, 
had offered a prize for the best poem on the subject of 
Hope, which Crabbe was so fortunate as to win, and the 
same magazine printed other short pieces in the same 
year, 1772. They were signed '^ G. C, Woodbridge," 
and included divers lyrics addressed to Mira. Other 
extant verses of the period of his residence at Wood- 
bridge show that he was making experiments in stanza- 
form on the model of earlier English poets, though 
without showing more than a certain imitative skill. 
But after he had been three years in the town, he 
made a more notable experiment and had found a 
printer in Ipswich to take the risk of publication. In 
1775 was printed in that town a didactic satire of some 
four hundred lines in the Popian couplet, entitled 
Inebriety. Coleridge's friend, who had to write a prize 
poem on the subject of Dr. Jenner, boldly opened with 
the invocation — 

"Inoculation ! Heavenly maid, descend." 

As the title of Crabbe's poem stands for the bane 
and not the antidote, he could not adopt the same 



10 CRABBE [chap. 

method, but he could not resist some other precedents 
of the epic sort, and begins thus, in close imitation of 
The Dunciad — 

*' The mighty spirit, and its power which stains 
The bloodless cheek and vivifies the brains, 
I sing." 

The apparent object of the satire was to describe the 
varied phases of Intemperance, as observed by the 
writer in different classes of society — the Villager, the 
Squire, the Farmer, the Parish Clergyman, and even 
the Nobleman's Chaplain, an official whom Crabbe as 
yet knew only by imagination. From childhood he 
had had ample experience of the vice in the rough 
and reckless homes of the Aldeburgh poor. His sub- 
sequent medical pursuits must have brought him into 
occasional contact with it among the middle classes, 
and even in the manor-houses and parsonages for 
which he made up the medicine in his master's surgery. 
But his treatment of the subject was too palpably 
imitative of one poetic model, already stale from 
repetition. Not only did he choose Pope's couplet, 
with all its familiar antitheses and other mannerisms, 
but frankly avowed it by parodying whole passages 
from the Essay on Man and Tlie Dunciad, the original 
lines being duly printed at the foot of the page. There 
is little of Crabbe's later accent of sympathy. Epi- 
gram is too obviously pursued, and much of the 
suggested acquaintance with the habits of the upper 
classes — 

" Champagne the courtier drinks, the spleen to chase, 
The colonel Burgundy, and Port his grace " — 

is borrowed from books and not from life. Nor 



I.] EARLY LIFE IN ALDEBURGH 11 

did the satire gain in lucidity from any editorial 
care. There are hardly two consecutive lines that do 
not suffer from a truly perverse theory of punctuation. 
A copy of the rare original is in the writer's possession, 
at the head of which the poet has inscribed his own 
maturer judgment of this youthful effort — "Pray let 
not this be seen . . . there is very little of it that I'm 
not heartily ashamed of." The little quarto pamphlet 
— " Ipswich, printed and sold by C. Punchard, Book- 
seller, in the Butter Market, 1775. Price one shilling 
and sixpence " — seems to have attracted no attention. 
And yet a critic of experience would have recognised 
in it a force as well as a fluenc}^ remarkable in a young 
man of twenty-one, and pointing to quite other possi- 
bilities when the age of imitation should have passed 
away. 

In 1775 Crabbe's term of apprenticeship to Mr. 
Page expired, and he returned to his home at Alde- 
burgh, hoping soon to repair to London and there 
continue his medical studies. But he found the 
domestic situation much changed for the worse. His 
mother (who, as we have seen, was several years older 
than her husband) was an invalid, and his father's 
habits and temper were not improving with time. He 
was by nature imperious, and had always (it would 
seem) been liable to intemperance of another kind. 
Moreover, a contested election for the Borough in 1774 
had brought with it its familiar temptations to pro- 
tracted debauch — and it is significant that in 1775 he 
vacated the office of churchwarden that he had held 
for many years. George, to whom his father was not 
as a rule unkind, did not shrink from once more 
assisting him among the butter-tubs on Slaughden 



12 CRABBE [CHAP. 

Quay. Poetry seems to have been for a while laid 
aside, the failure of his first venture having perhaps 
discouraged him. Some slight amount of practice in 
his profession fell to his share. An entry in the 
Minute Book of the Aldeburgh Board of Guardians of 
September 17, 1775, orders " that Mr. George Crabbe, 
Junr., shall be employed to cure the boy Howard of 
the itch, and that whenever any of the poor shall have 
occasion for a surgeon, the overseers shall apply 
to him for that purpose." But these very oppor- 
tunities perhaps only served to show George Crabbe 
how poorly he was equipped for his calling as surgeon, 
and after a period not specified means were found for 
sending him to London, where he lodged with a family 
from Aldeburgh who were in business in Whitechapel. 
How and where he then obtained instruction or prac- 
tice in his calling does not appear, though there is a 
gruesome story, recorded by his son, how a baby- 
subject for dissection was one day found in his cuj)- 
board by his landlady, who was hardly to be persuaded 
that it was not a lately lost infant of her own. In 
any case, within a year Crabbe's scanty means were 
exhausted, and he was once more in Aldeburgh, and 
assistant to an apothecary of the name of Maskill. 
This gentleman seems to have found Aldeburgh hope- 
less, for in a few months he left the town, and Crabbe 
set uj) for himself as his successor. But he was still 
poorly qualified for his profession, his skill in surgery 
being notably deficient. He attracted only the poorest 
class of patients — the fees were small and uncertain — 
and his prospects of an early marriage, or even of 
earning his living as a single man, seemed as far off 
as ever. Moreover, he was again cut off from con- 



I.] EARLY LIFE IN ALDEBURGH 13 

genial companionship, with only such relief as was 
afforded b}^ the occasional presence in the town of 
various JMilitia regiments, the officers of which gave 
him some of their patronage and society. 

He had still happily the assurance of the faithful 
devotion of Miss Elmy. Her father had been a tanner 
in the Suffolk town of Beccles, where her mother still 
resided, and where Miss Elmy paid her occasional 
visits. The long journey from Aldeburgh to Beccles 
was often taken by Crabbe, and the changing features 
of the scenery traversed were reproduced, his son tells 
us, many years afterwards in the beautiful tale of Hie 
Lovefs Walk. The tie between Crabbe and Miss Elmy 
was further strengthened by a dangerous fever from 
which Crabbe suffered in 1778-79, while Miss Elmy 
was a guest under his parents' roof. This was suc- 
ceeded by an illness of Miss Elmy, when Crabbe was 
in constant attendance at Parham Hall. His intimacy 
with the Tovells was moreover to be strengthened by 
a sad event in that family, the death of their only 
child, an engaging girl of fourteen. The social 
position of the Tovells, and in greater degree their 
fortune, was superior to that of the Crabbes, and the 
engagement of their niece to one whose prospects 
were so little brilliant had never been quite to their 
taste. But henceforth this feeling was to disappear. 
This crowning sorrow in the family wrought more 
cordial feelings. Crabbe was one of those who had 
known and been kind to their child, and such were now, 

" Peculiar people — death had made them dear." 

And henceforth the engagement between the lovers 
was frankly accepted. But though the course of this 



14 CRABBE [chap. 

true love was to run more and more smooth, the 
question of Crabbe's future means of living seemed as 
hopeless of solution as ever. 

And yet the enforced idleness of these following 
years was far from unprofitable. The less time 
occupied in the routine work of his profession, the 
more leisure he had for his favourite study of natural 
history, and especially of botany. This latter study 
had been taken up during his stay at Woodbridge, 
the neighbourhood of which had a Flora differing 
from that of the bleak coast country of Aldeburgh, 
and it was now pursued with the same zeal at home. 
Herbs then played a larger part than to-day among 
curative agents of the village doctor, and the fact 
that Crabbe sought and obtained them so readily was 
even pleaded by his poorer patients as reason why his 
fees need not be calculated on any large scale. But 
this absorbing pursuit did far more than serve to 
furnish Crabbe's outfit as a healer. It was un- 
doubtedly to the observing eye and retentive memory 
thus practised in the cottage gardens, and in the 
lanes, and meadows, and marshes of Suffolk that his 
descriptions, when once he found where his true 
strength lay, owed a charm for which readers of poetry 
had long been hungering. The floral outfit of pastoral 
poets, when Crabbe began to write, was a hortus siccus 
indeed. Distinctness in painting the common growth 
of field and hedgerow may be said to have had its 
origin with Crabbe. Gray and Goldsmith had their 
own rare and special gifts to which Crabbe could lay 
no claim. But neither these poets nor even Thomson, 
whose avowed purpose was to depict nature, are 
Crabbe's rivals in this respect. Byron in the most 



I.] EARLY LIFE IN ALDEBURGH 15 

hackneyed of all eulogies upon Crabbe defined him 
as "Nature's sternest painter yet the best." The 
criticism would have been juster had he written that 
Crabbe was the truest painter of Nature in her less 
lovely phases. Crabbe was not stern in his attitude 
either to his fellow-men, or to the varying aspects of 
Nature, although for the first years of his life he was 
in habitual contact with the less alluring side of both. 

But it was not only through a closer intimacy with 
Nature that Crabbe Avas being unconsciously prepared 
for high poetic service. Hope deferred and disap- 
pointments, poverty and anxiety, were doing their 
beneficent work. Notwithstanding certain early dis- 
sipations and escapades which his fellow-townsmen did 
not fail to remember against him in the later days of 
his success, Crabbe was of a genuinely religious tem- 
perament, and had been trained by a devout mother. 
Moreover, through a nearer and more sympathetic 
contact with the lives and sorrows of the poor suffer- 
ing, he was storing experience full of value for the 
future, though he was still and for some time longer 
under the spell of the dominant poetic fashion, and 
still hesitated to ^' look into his heart and write." 

But the time was bound to come when he must put 
his poetic quality to a final test. In London only 
could he hope to prove whether the verse, of which he 
was accumulating a store, was of a kind that men 
would care for. He must discover, and speedily, 
whether he was to take a modest place in the ranks 
of literature, or one even more humble in the shop of 
an apothecary. After weighing his chances and his 
risks for many a weary day he took the final resolution, 
and his son has told us the circumstances : — 



16 CRABBE [chap. 

" One gloomy day towards the close of the year 
1779, he had strolled to a bleak and cheerless part of 
the cliff above Aldeburgh, called The Marsh Hill, 
brooding as he went over the humiliating necessities of 
his condition, and plucking every now and then, I have 
no doubt, the hundredth specimen of some common 
weed. He stopped opposite a shallow, muddy piece of 
water, as desolate and gloomy as his own mind, called 
the Leech-pond, and ' it was while I gazed on it,' he 
said to my brother and me, one happy morning, Hhat 
I determined to go to London and venture all.' " 

About thirty years later, Crabbe contributed to a 
magazine {The New Monthly) some particulars of his 
early life, and referring to this critical moment added 
that he had not then heard of "another youthful 
adventurer," whose fate, had he known of it, might 
perhaps have deterred him from facing like calamities. 
Chatterton had "perished in his pride" nearly ten 
years before. As Crabbe thus recalled the scene of 
his own resolve, it may have struck him as a touching 
coincidence that it was by the Leech-pool on "the 
lonely moor " — though there was no " Leech-gatherer " 
at hand to lend him fortitude — that he resolved to 
encounter "Solitude, pain of heart, distress, and 
poverty." He was, indeed, little better equipped than 
Chatterton had been for the enterprise. His father 
was unable to assist him financially, and was disposed 
to reproach him for forsaking a profession, in the 
cause of which the family had already made sacrifices. 
The Crabbes and all their connections were poor, and 
George scarcely knew any one whom he might 
appeal to for even a loan. At length Mr. Dudley 
North, of Little Glemham Hall, near Parham, whose 



I.] EARLY LIFE IN ALDEBURGH 17 

brother had stood for Aldeburgh, was approached, and 
sent the sum asked for — five pounds. George Crabbe, 
after paying his debts, set sail for London on board a 
sloop at Slaughden Quay — " master of a box of clothes, 
a small case of surgical instruments, and three pounds 
in money." This was in April 1780. 



CHAPTER II 



POVERTY IN LONDON 



(1780-1781) 



Crabbe had no acquaintances of his own in London, 
and the only introduction he carried with him was to 
an old friend of Miss Elmy's, a Mrs. Burcham, married 
to a linen-draper in Cornhill. In order to be near 
these friendl}^ persons he took lodgings, close to the 
Eoyal Exchange, in the house of a hairdresser, a Mr. 
Vickery, at whose suggestion, do doubt, he provided 
himself with "a fashionable tie-wig." Crabbe at 
once began preparations for his literary campaign, by 
correcting such verse as he had brought with him, 
completing "two dramas and a variety of prose 
essays," and generally improving himself by a course 
of study and practice in composition. As in the old 
Woodbridge days, he made some congenial acquaint- 
ances at a little club that met at a neighbouring coffee- 
house, which included a Mr. Bonnycastle and a Mr. 
Eeuben Burrow, both mathematicians of repute, who 
rose to fill important positions in their day. These 
recreations he diversified with country excursions, 
during which he read Horace and Ovid, or searched 
the woods around London for plants and insects. 

Erom his first arrival in town Crabbe kept a diary 
or journal, addressed to his " Mira" at Parham, and we 
owe to it a detailed account of his earlier struggles, 

18 



[chap. II.] POVERTY IN LONDON 19 

three montlis of the journal having survived and 
fallen into his son's hands after the poet's death. 
Crabbe had arrived in London in April, and by the 
end of the month we learn from the journal that he 
was engaged upon a work in prose, '' A Plan for the 
Examination of our Moral and Eeligious Opinions," 
and also on a poetical "Epistle to Prince William 
Henry," afterwards William TV., who had only the 
year before entered the navy as midshipman, but had 
already seen some service under Kodney. The next 
day's entry in the diary tells how he was not neglect- 
ing other possible chances of an honest livelihood. He 
had answered an advertisement in the Daily Advertiser 
for "an amanuensis, of grammatical education, and 
endued with a genius capable of making improvements 
in the writings of a gentleman not well versed in the 
English language." Two days later he called for a 
reply, only to find that the gentleman was suited. 
The same day's entry also records how he had sent 
his poem (probably the ode to the young Sailor- 
Prince) to Mr. Dodsley. Only a day later he writes: 
" Judging it best to have two strings to the bow, and 
fearing Mr. Dodsley's will snap, I have finished 
another little work from that awkward-titled piece, 
^ The Foes of Mankind ' : have run it on to three 
hundred and fifty lines, and given it a still more odd 
name, ' An Epistle from the Devil.' To-morrow I hope 
to transcribe it fair, and send it by Monday." 

" Mr. Dodsley's reply just received : ' Mr. Dodsley 
presents his compliments to the gentleman who 
favoured him with the enclosed poem, which he has 
returned, as he apprehends the sale of it would prob- 
ably not enable him to give any consideration. He 



20 CRABBE [chap. 

does not mean to insinuate a want of merit in the 
poem, but rather a want of attention in the public' " 

All this was sufficiently discouraging, and the next 
day's record is one of even worse omen. The poet 
thanks Heaven that his spirits are not affected by Mr. 
Dodsley's refusal, and that he is already preparing 
another poem for another bookseller, Mr. Becket. 
He adds, however : " I find myself under the disagree- 
able necessity of vending or pawning some of my more 
useless articles : accordingly have put into a paper 
such as cost about two or three guineas, and, being 
silver, have not greatly lessened in their value. The 
conscientious pawnbroker allowed me — 'he thought 
he might ' — half a guinea for them. I took it very 
readily, being determined to call for them very soon, 
and then, if I afterwards wanted, carry them to some 
less voracious animal of the kind." 

The entries during the next six weeks continue of 
the same tenor. Mr. Becket, for whose approval were 
sent " Poetical Epistles, with a preface by the learned 
Martinus Scriblerus " (he was still harping on the 
string of the Augustans), proved no more responsive 
than Dodsley. " 'Twas a very pretty thing, but, sir, 
these little pieces the town do not regard." By 
May 16th he had " sold his wardrobe, pawned his watch, 
was in debt to his landlord, and finally at some loss 
how to eat a week longer." Two days later he had 
pawned his surgical instruments — redeemed and re- 
pawned his watch on more favourable terms — and was 
rejoiced to find himself still the possessor of ten 
shillings. He remained stout of heart — his faith in 
Providence still his strong comfort — and the Vickery 
family, though he must have been constantly in their 



II.] POVERTY IN LONDON 21 

debtj were unfailingly kind and hospitable. He was also 
appealing to the possible patrons of literature among 
the leading statesmen of the hour. On May 21 we 
learn that he was preparing " a book " (which of his 
many ventures of the hour, is uncertain), and with it 
a letter for the Prime Minister, Lord North, whose 
relative, Dudley North, had started him on his journey 
to London. When, after a fortnight's suspense, this 
request for assistance had been refused, he writes yet 
more urgently to Lord Shelburne (at that time out of 
office) complaining bitterly of North's hardness of heart, 
and appealing on this occasion to his hoped-for patron 
both in prose and verse — 

"Ah ! Shelburne, blest with all that's good or great, 
T' adorn a rich or save a sinking state, 
If public Ills engross not all thy care, 
Let private Woe assail a patriot's ear, 
Pity confined, but not less warm, impart, 
And unresisted win thy noble heart" — 

with much more in the same vein of innocent 
flattery. But once again Crabbe was doomed to dis- 
appointment. He had already, it would seem, appealed 
to Lord Chancellor Thurlow, with no better success. 
Crabbe felt these successive repulses very keenly, 
but it is not necessary to tax North, Shelburne, and 
Thurlow with exceptional hardness of heart. London 
was as full of needy literary adventurers as it had been 
in the days of Tlie Dunciad, and men holding the posi- 
tion of these ministers and ex-ministers were probably 
receiving similar applications every week of their lives. 
During three days in June, Crabbe's attention is 
diverted from his own distresses by the Lord George 
Gordon Riots, of which his journal from June 8th 



22 CRABBE [chap. 

contains some interesting particulars. He was him> 
self an eye-witness of some of the most disgraceful 
excesses of the mob, the burning of the governor of 
Newgate's house, and the setting at liberty of the 
prisoners. He also saw Lord George himself, '^ a lively- 
looking young man in appearance," drawn in his coach 
by the mob towards the residence of Alderman Bull, 
" bowing as he passed along." 

At this point the diary ends, or in any case the 
concluding portion was never seen by the poet's son. 
And yet at the date when it closed, Crabbe Avas nearer 
to at least the semblance of a success than he had 
yet approached. He had at length found a publisher 
willing to print, and apparently at his own risk, " Tlie 
Candidate — a Poetical Epistle to the Authors of the 
Monthly Beview,'' that journal being the chief organ 
of literary criticism at the time. The idea of this 
attempt to propitiate the critics in advance, with a 
view to other poetic efforts in the future, was not 
felicitous. The publisher, " H. Payne, opposite Marl- 
borough House, Pall Mall," had pledged himself that 
the author should receive some share of the profits, 
however small ; but even if he had not become bank- 
rupt immediately after its publication, it is unlikely 
that Crabbe would have profited by a single penny. 
It was indeed a very ill-advised attempt, even as 
regards the reviewers addressed. The very tone 
adopted, that of deprecation of criticism, would be 
in their view a proof of weakness, and as such they 
accepted it. Nor had the poem any better chance 
with the general reader. Its rhetoric and versifica- 
tion were only one more of the interminable echoes 
of the manner of Pope. It had no organic unity. 



II.] POVERTY IN LONDON 23 

The wearisome note of plea for indulgence had to be 
relieved at intervals by such irrelevant episodes as 
compliments to the absent " Mira," and to Wolfe, who 
" conquered as he fell '^ — twenty years or so before. 
The critics of the Monthly Review, far from being 
mollified by the poet's appeal, received the poem with 
the cruel but perfectly just remark that it had "that 
material defect, the want of a proper subject." 

An allegorical e^^isode may be cited as a sample of 
the general style of this effusion. The poet relates 
how the Genius of Poetry (like, but how unlike, 
her who was seen by Burns in vision) appeared to 
him with counsel how best to hit the taste of the 
town : — 

"Be not too eager in the arduous chase ; 
Who pants for triumph seldom wins tlie race : 
Venture not all, but wisely hoard thy worth, 
And let thy labours one by one go forth : 
Some happier scrap capricious wits may find 
On a fair day, and be profusely kind ; 
Which, buried in the rubbish of a throng. 
Had pleased as little as a new-year's song, 
Or lover's verse, that cloyed with nauseous sweet, 
Or birthday ode, that ran on ill-paired feet. 
Merit not always — Fortune feeds the bard, 
And as the whim inclines bestows reward : 
None without wit, nor with it numbers gain ; 
To please is hard, but none shall please in vain : 
As a coy mistress is the humoured town, 
Loth every lover with success to crown ; 
He who would win must every effort try, 
Sail in the mode, and to the fashion fly ; 
Must gay or grave to every humour dress, 
And watch the lucky Moment of Success ; 
That caught, no more his eager hopes are crost ; 
But vain are Wit and Love, when that is lost. ' ' 



24 CRABBE [chap. 

Crabbe's son and biographer remarks with justice 
that the time of his father's arrival in London was 
'^not unfavourable for a new Candidate in Poetry. 
The giantSj Swift and Pope, had passed away, leaving 
each in his department examples never to be excelled; 
but the style of each had been so long imitated by 
inferior persons that the world was not unlikely to 
welcome some one who should strike into a newer path. 
The strong and powerful satirist Churchill, the classic 
Gray, and the inimitable Goldsmith had also departed; 
and more recently still, Chatterton had paid the bitter 
penalty of his imprudence under circumstances which 
must surely have rather disposed the patrons of talent 
to watch the next opportunity that might offer itself 
of encouraging genius ^by poverty depressed.' The 
stupendous Johnson, unrivalled in general literature, 
had from an early period withdrawn himself from 
poetry. Cowper, destined to fill so large a space in 
the public eye somewhat later, had not as yet appeared 
as an author ; and as for Burns, he was still unknown 
beyond the obscure circle of his fellow-villagers." 

All this is quite true, but it was not for such facile 
cleverness as The Candidate that the lovers of poetry 
were impatient. Up to this point Crabbe shows him- 
self wholly unsuspicious of this fact. It had not 
occurred to him that it was possible for him safely to 
trust his own instincts. And yet there is a stray 
entry in his diary which seems to show how (in 
obedience to his visionary instructor) he was trying 
experiments in more hopeful directions. On the 
twelfth of May he intimates to his Mira that he has 
dreams of success in something different, something 
more human than had yet engaged his thoughts. 



II.] POVERTY IN LONDON 25 

"For the first time in my life that I recollect," he 
writes, " I have written three or four stanzas that so 
far touched me in the reading them as to take off 
the consideration that they were things of my own 
fancy." Thus far there was nothing in what he had 
printed — in Inebriety or The Candidate — that could 
possibly have touched his heart or that of his readers. 
And it may well have been that he was now turning 
for fresh themes to those real sorrows, those genuine, 
if homely, human interests of which he had already 
so intimate an experience. 

However that may have been, the combined cold- 
ness of his reviewers and failure of his bookseller must 
have brought Crabbe within as near an approach to 
despair as his healthy nature allowed. His distress 
was now extreme ; he was incurring debts with little 
hope of paying them, and creditors were pressing. 
Forty years later he told Walter Scott and Lockhart 
how " during many months when he was toiling in 
early life in London he hardly ever tasted butcher- 
meat except on a Sunday, when he dined usually with 
a tradesman's family, and thought their leg of mutton, 
baked in the pan, the perfection of luxury." And it 
was only after some more weary months, when at last 
"want stared him in the face, and a gaol seemed 
the only immediate refuge for his head," that he 
resolved, as a last resort, to lay his case once more 
before some public man of eminence and character. 
"Impelled" (to use his own words) "by some pro- 
pitious influence, he fixed in some happy moment 
upon Edmund Burke — one of the first of Englishmen, 
and in the capacity and energy of his mind, one of 
the greatest of human beings." 



26 CRABBE [chap. 

It was in one of the early months of 1781 (the 
exact date seems to be undiscoverable) that Crabbe 
addressed his letter, with specimens of his poetry, to 
Burke at his London residence. The letter has been 
preserved, and runs as follows : — 

"Sir, — I am sensible that I need even your talents to 
apologise for the freedom I now take ; but I have a plea 
which, however simply urged, will, with a mind like yours, 
sir, procure me pardon. I am one of those outcasts on the 
world who are without a friend, without employment, and 
without bread. 

" Pardon me a short preface. I had a partial father who 
gave me a better education than his broken fortune would 
have allowed ; and a better than was necessary, as he could 
give me that only. I was designed for the profession of 
physic, but not having wherewithal to complete the requisite 
studies, the design but served to convince me of a parent's 
affection, and the error it had occasioned. In April last I 
came to London with three pounds, and flattered myself this 
would be sufficient to supply me with the common necessaries 
of life till my abilities should procure me more ; of these I 
had the highest opinion, and a poetical vanity contributed to 
my delusion. I knew little of the world, and had read books 
only : I wrote, and fancied perfection in my compositions ; 
when I wanted bread they promised me affluence, and soothed 
me with dreams of reputation, whilst my appearance subjected 
me to contempt. 

"Time, reflection, and want have shown me my mistake. 
I see my trifles in that which I think the true light ; and 
whilst I deem them such, have yet the opinion that holds 
them superior to the common run of poetical publications. 

"I had some knowledge of the late Mr. Nassau, the brother 
of Lord Rocliford ; in consequence of which I asked his Lord- 
ship's permission to inscribe ray little work to him. Knowing 
it to be free from all political allusions and personal abuse, 
it was no very material point to me to whom it was dedicated. 
His Lordship thought it none to him, and obligingly con- 
sented to my request. 



II.] POVERTY IN LONDON 27 

"I was told that a subscription would be the more profit- 
able method for me, and, therefore, endeavoured to circulate 
copies of the enclosed Proposals. 

"I am afraid, sir, I disgust you with this very dull narra- 
tion, but believe me punished in the misery that occasions it. 
You will conclude that during this time I must have been at 
more expense than I could afford : indeed the most parsi- 
monious could not have avoided it. The printer deceived 
me, and my little business has had every delay. The people 
with whom I live perceive my situation, and find me to be 
indigent and without friends. About ten days since I was 
compelled to give a note for seven pounds, to avoid an arrest 
for about double that sum which I owe. I wrote to every 
friend I had, but my friends are poor likewise : the time of 
payment approached, and I ventured to represent my case 
to Lord Rochford. I begged to be credited for this sum till 
I received it of my subscribers, which I believe will be within 
one month : but to this letter I had no reply, and I have 
probably offended by my importunity. Having used every 
honest means in vain, I yesterday confessed my inability, and 
obtained with much entreaty and as the greatest favour a 
week's forbearance, when I am positively told that I must 
pay the money or prepare for a prison. 

"You will guess the purpose of so long an introduction. I 
appeal to you, sir, as a good and, let me add, a great man. 
I have no other pretensions to your favour than that I am 
an unhappy one. It is not easy to support the thoughts of 
confinement ; and I am coward enough to dread such an end 
to my suspense. Can you, sir, in any degree aid me with 
propriety ? Will you. ask any demonstrations of my veracity ? 
I have imposed upon myself, but I have been gTiilty of no 
other imposition. Let me, if possible, interest your com- 
passion. I know those of rank and fortune are teased with 
frequent petitions, and are compelled to refuse the requests 
even of those whom they know to be in distress : it is, there- 
fore, with a distant hope I ventured to solicit such favour : 
but you will forgive me, sir, if you do not think proper 
to relieve. It is impossible that sentiments like yours can 
proceed from any but a humane and generous heart. 



28 CRABBE [chap. 

"I will call upon you, sir, to-morrow, and if I have not the 
happiness to obtain credit with you, I must submit to my fate. 
My existence is a pain to myself, and every one near and dear 
to me are distressed in my distresses. My connections, once 
the source of happiness, now embitter the reverse of my 
fortune, and I have only to hope a speedy end to a life so 
unpromisingly begun : in which (though it ought not to be 
boasted of) I can reap some consolation from looking to the end 
of it. I am, sir, with the greatest respect, your obedient 
and most humble servant, George Crabbe." 

The letter is undated, but, as we shall see, 
must have been written in February or March of 
1781. Crabbe delivered it with his own hands at 
Burke's house in Charles Street, St. James's, and 
(as he long after told Walter Scott) paced up and 
down Westminster Bridge all night in an agony of 
suspense. 

This suspense was not of long duration. Crabbe 
made his threatened call, and anxiety was speedily at 
an end. He had sent with his letter specimens of his 
verse still in manuscript. Whether Burke had had 
time to do more than glance at them — for they had 
been in his hands but a few hours — is uncertain. But 
it may well have been that the tone as well as the 
substance of Crabbe's letter struck the great states- 
man as something apart from the usual strain of the 
literary pretender. During Burke's first years in 
London, when he himself lived by literature and saw 
much of the lives and ways of poets and pamphleteers, 
he must have gained some experience that served him 
later in good stead. There was a flavour of truthful- 
ness in Crabbe's story that could hardly be delusive, 
and a strain of modesty blended with courage that 
would at once appeal to Burke's generous nature. 



II.] POVERTY IN LONDON 29 

Again, Burke was not a x:>oet (save in the glowing 
periods of his prose), but he had read widely in the 
poets, and had himself been possessed at one stage 
of his youth '^ with the furor jjoeticus.^' At this special 
juncture he had indeed little leisure for such matters. 
He had lost his seat for Bristol in the preceding year, 
but had speedily found another at Mai ton, — a pocket- 
borough of Lord Eockingham's, — and, at the moment 
of Crabbe's appeal, was again actively opposing the 
policy of the King and Lord North. But he yet 
found time for an act of kindness that was to have 
no inconsiderable influence on English literature. 
The result of the interview was that Crabbe's imme- 
diate necessities were relieved by a gift of money, 
and by the assurance that Burke would do all in 
his power to further Crabbe's literary aims. What 
particular poems or fragments of poetry had been 
first sent to Burke is uncertain; but among those 
submitted to his judgment were specimens of the 
poems to be henceforth known as The Library and 
The Village. Crabbe afterwards learned that the 
lines which first convinced Burke that a new and 
genuine poet had arisen were the following from The 
Village^ in which the author told of his resolution 
to leave the home of his birth and try his fortune 
in the city of wits and scholars — 

"As on their neighbouring Ibeach yon swallows stand 
And wait for favouring winds to leave the land ; 
While still for flight the ready wing is spread : 
So waited I the favouring hour, and fled ; 
Fled from these shores where guilt and famine reign, 
And cried, 'Ah ! hapless they who still remain — 
Who still remain to hear the ocean roar. 
Whose greedy waves devour the lessening shore ; 



30 CRABBE [chap. 

Till some fierce tide, with more imperious sway, 
Sweeps the low hut and all it holds away ; 
When the sad tenant weeps from door to door, 
And begs a poor protection from the poor ! " 

Burke miglit well have been impressed by sucli a 
passage. In some other specimens of Crabbe's verse, 
submitted at the same time to his judgment, the note 
of a very different school was dominant. But here for 
the moment appears a fresher key and a later model. 
In the lines just quoted the feeling and the cadence of 
The Traveller and The Deserted Village are unmistakable. 
But if they suggest comparison with the exquisite 
passage in the latter beginning — ■ 

" And as the hare, whom hounds and horns pursue, 
Pants to the place from which at first she flew," 

they also suggest a contrast. Burke's experienced eye 
would detect that if there was something in Crabbe's 
more Pope-like couplets that was not found in Pope, 
so there was something here more poignant than even 
in Goldsmith. 

Crabbe's son reflected with just pride that there 
must have been something in his father's manners and 
bearing that at the outset invited Burke's confidence 
and made intimacy at once possible, although Crabbe's 
previous associates had been so different from the 
educated gentry of London. In telling of his new- 
found poet a few days afterwards to Sir Joshua 
Eeynolds, Burke said that he had " the mind and feel- 
ings of a gentleman." And he acted boldly on this 
assurance by at once placing Crabbe on the footing of a 
friend, and admitting him to his family circle. *'He 
was invited to Beaconsfield," Crabbe wrote in his short 



II.] POVERTY IN LONDON 31 

autobiographical sketch, ^^the seat of his protector, 
and was there placed in a convenient apartment, 
supplied with books for his information and amuse- 
ment, and made a member of a family whom it was 
honour as well as pleasure to become in any degree 
associated with.'' The time thus spent was profitable 
to Crabbe in other ways than by enlarging his know- 
ledge and ideas, and laying the foundation of many 
valued friendships. He devoted himself in earnest 
to complete his unfinished poems and revise others 
under Burke's judicious criticism. The poem he first 
published, Tlie Library, he himself tells us, was written 
partly in his presence and submitted as a whole to his 
judgment. Crabbe elsewhere indicates clearly what 
were the weak points of his art, and what tendencies 
Burke found it most necessary he should counter- 
act. Writing his reminiscences in the third person 
years later, he naively admitted that " Mr. Crabbe had 
sometimes the satisfaction of hearing, when the verses 
were bad, that the thoughts deserved better ; and that 
if he had the common faults of inexperienced writers, 
he had frequently the merit of thinking for himself." 
The first clause of this sentence might be applied to 
Crabbe's poetry to the very end of his days. Of his 
later and far maturer poems, when he had ceased to 
polish, it is too true that the thoughts are often bet- 
ter than their treatment. His latest publisher, John 
Murray, used to say that in conversation Crabbe often 
" said uncommon things in so common a way " that 
they passed unnoticed. The remark applies equally 
to much of Crabbe's poetry. But at least, if this 
incongruity is to exist, it is on the more hopeful side. 
The characteristic of so much poetry of our own day 



32 CRABBE [chap. 

is that the manner is uncommon, and the commonness 
resides in the matter. 

When Crabbe had completed his revisions to his 
own satisfaction and his adviser's, Burke suggested the 
publication of The Library and The Village, and the 
former poem was laid before Mr. Dodsley, who only a 
few months before had refused a poem from the same 
hand. But circumstances were now changed, and 
Burke's recommendation and support were all-sufficient. 
Dodsley was all politeness, and though he declined to 
incur any risk — this was doubtless borne by Burke — 
he promised his best endeavours to make the poem a 
success. Tlie Library was published, anonymously, in 
June 1781. The Monthly and the Critical Reviews 
awarded it a certain amount of faint praise, but the 
success with the general public seems only to have 
been slight. 

When Burke selected this poem to lay before 
Dodsley, he had already read portions of The Village, 
and it seems strange that he should have given Tlie 
Library precedence, for the other was in every respect 
the more remarkable. But Burke, a conservative in 
this as in other matters, probably thought that a new 
poet desiring to be heard would be wiser in not at once 
quitting the old paths. The readers of poetry still 
had a taste for didactic epigram varied by a certain 
amount of florid rhetoric. And there was little 
beyond this in Crabbe's moralisings on the respec- 
tive functions of theology, history, poetry, and the 
rest, as represented on the shelves of a library, and on 
the blessings of literature to the heart when wearied 
with business and the cares of life. Crabbe's verses 
on such topics are by no means ineffective. He had 



II.] POVERTY IN LONDON 33 

caught perfectly the trick of the school so soon to pass 
away. He is as fluent and copious — as skilful in 
spreading a truism over a dozen well-sounding lines — 
as any of his predecessors. There is little new in the 
way of ideas. Crabbe had as yet no wide insight into 
books and authors, and he was forced to deal largely 
in generalities. But he showed that he had already 
some idea of style ; and if, when he had so little to say, 
he could say it with so much semblance of power, it 
was certain that when he had observed and thought for 
himself he would go further and make a deeper mark. 
The heroic couplet controlled him to the end of his 
life, and there is no doubt that it was not merely 
timidity that made him confine himself to the old 
beaten track. Crabbe's thoughts ran very much in 
antithesis, and the couplet suited this tendency. But 
it had its serious limitations. Southey's touching 
stanzas — 

" My days among the dead are passed," 

though the ideas embodied are no more novel than 
Crabbe's, are worth scores of such lines as these — 

" With awe, around these silent walks I tread ; 
These are the lasting mansions of the dead : 
' The dead ! ' methinks a thousand tongues reply ; 
' These are the tombs of such as cannot die ! 
Crowned with eternal fame, they sit sublime, 
And lau^h at all the little strife of Time.' " 



CHAPTER III 

FRIENDSHIP WITH BURKE 

(1781-1783) 

Thus far I liave followed the guidance of Crabbe's son 
and biographer, but there is much that is confused 
and incomplete in his narrative. The story of Crabbe's 
life, as told by the son, leaves us in much doubt as to 
the order of events in 1780-1781. The memorable 
letter to Burke was, as we have seen, without a date. 
The omission is not strange, for the letter was written 
by Crabbe in great anguish of mind, and was left by 
his own hand at Burke's door. The son, though he 
evidently obtained from his father most of the infor- 
mation he was afterwards to use, never extracted this 
date from him. He tells us that up to the time of his 
undertaking the Biography, he did not even know 
that the original of the letter was in existence. He 
also tells us that until he and his brother saw the 
letter they had little idea of the extreme poverty and 
anxiety which their father had experienced during his 
time in London. Obviously Crabbe himself had been 
reticent on the subject even with his own family. 
From the midsummer of 1780, when the "Journal to 
Mira " comes to an end, to the February or March of 
the following year, there is a blank in the Biography 
which the son was unable to fill. At the time the 
fragment of Diary closes, Crabbe was apparently at 
the very end of his resources. He had pawned all his 

34 



[ciiAP. III.] FRIENDSHIP WITH BURKE 35 

personal property, liis books and his surgical imple- 
ments, and was still in debt. He bad begged assistance 
from many of the leading statesmen of the hour 
without success. How did he contrive to exist between 
June 1780 and the early months of 1781 ? 

The problem might never have been solved for us 
had it not been for the accidental publication, four 
years after the Biography appeared, of a second letter 
from Crabbe to Burke. In 1838, Sir Henry Bunbury, 
in an appendix to the Memoir and Correspondence 
of Sir Thomas Hanmer (Speaker of the House of 
Commons, and Shakespearian editor), printed a collec- 
tion of miscellaneous letters from distinguished men 
in the possession of the Bunbury family. Among 
these is a letter of Crabbe to Burke, undated save as 
to the month, which is given as June 26th. The 
year, however, is obviously 1781, for the letter con- 
sists of further details of Crabbe's early life, not 
supx^lied in the earlier effusion. At the date of this 
second letter, Crabbe had been known to Burke three 
or four months. During that time Crabbe had been 
constantly seeing Burke, and with his help had been 
revising for the press the poem of The Library, which 
was published by Dodsley in this very month, June 
1781. The first impression, accordingly, produced on 
us by the letter, is one of surprise that after so long 
a period of intimate association with Burke, Crabbe 
should still be writing in a tone of profound anxiety 
and discouragement as to his future prospects. 
According to the son's account of the situation, when 
Crabbe left Burke's house after their first meeting, 
" he was, in the common phrase, ' a made man ' — from 
that hour." That short interview " entirely, and for 



36 CRABBE [chap. 

ever, changed the nature of his worldly fortunes.'^ 
This, in a sense, was undoubtedly true, though not 
perhaps as the writer meant. It is clear from the 
letter first printed by Sir Henry Bunbury, that up to 
the end of June 1781, Crabbe's future occupation in 
life was still unfixed, and that he was full of mis- 
givings as to the means of earning a livelihood. 

The letter is of great interest in many respects, but 
is too long to print as a whole in the text.^ It throws 
light upon the blank space in Crabbe's history just 
now referred to. It tells the story of a period of 
humiliation and distress, concerning which it is easy 
to understand that even in the days of his fame and 
prosperity Crabbe may well have refrained from 
speaking with his children. After relating in full his 
early struggles as an imperfectly qualified country 
doctor, and his subsequent fortunes in London up to 
the day of his appeal to Burke, Crabbe proceeds — 
" It will perhaps be asked how I could live near twelve 
months a stranger in London; and coming without 
money, it is not to be sup]30sed I was immediately 
credited. It is not ; my support arose from another 
source. In the very early part of my life I contracted 
some acquaintance, which afterwards became a serious 
connection, with the niece of a Suffolk gentleman of 
large fortune. Her mother lives with her three 

1 1 cannot deny myself the pleasure of here acknowledging my 
indehtedness to a French scholar, M. Huchon of the University 
of Nancy. M. Huchon is himself engaged upon a study of 
the Life and Poetry of Crabbe, and in the course of a conver- 
sation with me in London, first called my attention to the 
volume containing this letter. I agree with him in thinking 
that no previous biographer of Crabbe has been aware of its 
existence. 



III.] FRIENDSHIP WITH BURKE 37 

daughters at Beccles ; her income is but the in- 
terest of fifteen hundred pounds, which at her 
decease is to be divided betwixt her children. The 
brother makes her annual income about a hundred 
pounds ; he is a rigid economist, and though I 
have the pleasure of his approbation, I have not 
the good fortune to obtain more, nor from a pru- 
dent man could I perhaps expect so much. But from 
the family at Beccles I have every mark of their atten- 
tion, and every proof of their disinterested regard. 
They have from time to time supplied me with such 
sums as they could possibly spare, and that they have 
not done more arose from my concealing the severity 
of my situation, for I would not involve in my errors 
or misfortunes a very generous and very happy family 
by which I am received with unaffected sincerity, and 
where I am treated as a son by a mother who can have 
no prudential reason to rejoice that her daughter has 
formed such a connection. It is this family I lately 
visited, and by which I am pressed to return, for they 
know the necessity there is for me to live with the 
utmost frugality, and hopeless of my succeeding in 
town, they invite me to partake of their little fortune, 
and as I cannot mend my prospects, to avoid making 
them worse." The letter ends with an earnest appeal 
to Burke to help him to any honest occupation that 
may enable him to live Avithout being a burden 
on the slender resources of Miss Elmy's family. 
Crabbe is full of gratitude for all that Burke has thus 
far done for him. He has helped him to complete and 
publish his poem, but Crabbe is evidently aware that 
poetry does not mean a livelihood, and that his future 
is as dark as ever. The letter is dated from Crabbers 



38 CRABBE [chap. 

old lodging with tlie Vickerys in Bishopsgate Street, 
and lie had been lately staying with the Elmys 
at Beccles. He was not therefore as yet a visitor 
under Burke's roof. This was yet to come, with all 
the happy results that were to follow. It may still 
seem strange that all these details remained to be told 
to Burke four months after their acquaintance had 
begun. An explanation of this may be found in the 
autobiographical matter that Crabbe late in life 
supplied to the Neio Monthly Magazine in 1816. He 
there intimates that after Burke had generously 
assisted him in other ways, besides enabling him to 
publish The Library, the question had been discussed 
of Crabbe's future calling. ^^ Mr. Crabbe was encour- 
aged to lay open his views, past and present ; to dis- 
play whatever reading aud acquirements he possessed; 
to explain the causes of his disappointments, and the 
cloudiness of his prospects; in short he concealed 
nothing from a friend so able to guide inexperience, 
and so willing to pardon inadvertency." Obviously it 
was in answer to such invitations from Burke that the 
letter of the 26th of June 1781 was written. 

It was probably soon after the publication of Tlie 
Library that Crabbe paid his first visit to Beaconsfield, 
and was welcomed as a guest by Burke's wife and her 
niece as cordially as by the statesman himself. Here he 
first met Charles James Fox and Sir Joshua Reynolds, 
and through the latter soon became acquainted Avith 
Samuel Johnson, on whom he called in Bolt Court. 
Later in the year, when in London, Crabbe had lodg- 
ings hard by the Burkes in St. James's Place, and con- 
tinued to be a frequent guest at their table, where he 
met other of Burke's distinguished friends, political 



III.] FRIENDSHIP WITH BURKE 39 

and literary. Among these was Lord Chancellor 
Thurlow to whom Crabbe had appealed, without suc- 
cess, in his less fortunate days. On that occasion 
Thurlow had simply replied, in regard to the poems 
which Crabbe had enclosed, "that his avocations did 
not leave him leisure to read verses." To this Crabbe 
had been so unwise as to reply that it was one of a 
Lord Chancellor's functions to relieve merit in distress. 
But the good-natured Chancellor had not resented the 
impertinence, and now hearing afresh from Burke of 
his old petitioner, invited Crabbe to breakfast, and 
made him a generous apology. "The first poem you 
sent me. Sir," he said, " I ought to have noticed, — and 
I heartily forgive the second." At parting, Thurlow 
pressed a sealed packet containing a hundred pounds 
into Crabbe's hand, and assured him of further help 
when Crabbe should have taken Holy Orders. 

For already, as the result of Burke's unceasing 
interest in his new friend, Crabbe's future calling had 
been decided. In the course of conversations at 
Beaconsfield Burke had discovered that his tastes and 
gifts pointed much more clearly towards divinity than 
to medicine. His special training for the office of a 
clergyman was of course deficient. He probably had 
no Grreek, but he had mastered enough of Latin to read 
and quote the Latin poets. Moreover, his chief passion 
from early youth had been for botany, and the treatises 
on that subject were, in Crabbe's day, written in the 
language adopted in all scientific works. "It is most 
fortunate," said Burke, "that your father exerted 
himself to send you to that second school ; without a 
little Latin we should have made nothing of you : now, 
I think we shall succeed." Moreover Crabbe had been 



40 CRABBE [chap. 

a wide and discursive reader. " Mr. Crabbe/' Burke 
told Reynolds, " appears to know something of every 
thing." As to his more serious qualifications for the 
profession, his natural piety, as shown in the diaries 
kept in his days of trial, was beyond doubt. He was 
well read in the Scriptures, and the example of a 
religious and much-tried mother had not been without 
its influence. There had been some dissipations of his 
earlier manhood, as his son admits, to repent of and to 
put away ; but the growth of his character in all that 
was excellent was unimpeachable, and Burke was 
amply justified in recommending Crabbe as a candidate 
for orders to the Bishop of Norwich. He was ordained 
on the 21st of December 1781 to the curacy of his 
native town. 

On arriving in Aldeburgh Crabbe once more set up 
housekeeping with a sister, as he had done in his 
less prosperous days as parish doctor. Sad changes had 
occurred in his old home during the two years of his 
absence. His mother had passed away after her many 
years of patient suffering, and his father's temper and 
habits were not the better for losing the wholesome 
restraints of her presence. But his attitude to his 
clergyman son was at once changed. He was proud of 
his reputation and his new-formed friends, and of the 
proofs he had given that the money spent on his 
education had not been thrown away. But, apart from 
the family pride in him, and that of Miss Elmy and 
other friends at Parham, Crabbe's reception by his 
former friends and neighbours in Aldeburgh was not 
of the kind he might have hoped to receive. He had 
left the place less than three years before, a half -trained 
and unappreciated practitioner in physic, to seek his 



III.] FRIENDSHIP WITH BURKE 41 

fortune among strangers in London, with the f orlornest 
hopes of success. Jealousy of his elevated position and 
improved fortunes set in with much severity. On the 
other hand, it was more than many could tolerate that 
the hedge-apothecary of old should be empowered to 
hold forth in a pulpit. Crabbe himself in later life 
admitted to his children that his treatment at the 
hands of his fellow-townsmen was markedly unkind. 
Even though he was happy in the improved relations 
with his own family, and in the renewed opportuni- 
ties of frequent intercourse with Miss Elmy and the 
Tovells, Crabbe's position during the few months at 
Aldeburgh was far from agreeable. The religious 
influence, moreover, which he would naturally have 
wished to exercise in his new sx^here would obviously 
suffer in consequence. The result was that in accord- 
ance with the assurances given him by Thurlow at 
their last meeting, Crabbe again laid his difficulties 
before the Chancellor. Thurlow quite reasonably 
replied that he could not form any opinion as to 
Crabbe's present situation — " still less upon the agree- 
ableness of it"; and hinted that a somewhat longer 
period of probation was advisable before he selected 
Crabbe for preferment in the Church. 

Other relief was however at hand, and once more 
through the watchful care of Burke. Crabbe received 
a letter from his faithful friend to the effect that he 
had mentioned his case to the Duke of Eutland, and 
that the Duke had offered him the post of domestic 
chaplain at Belvoir Castle, when he might be free from 
his engagements at Aldeburgh. That Burke should 
have ventured on this step is significant, both as re- 
gards the Duke and Duchess, and Crabbe. Crabbe's 



42 CRABBE [chap. 

son remarks with truth that an appointment of the 
kind was unusual, "such situations in the mansions of 
that rank being commonly filled either by relations 
of the family itself, or by college acquaintances, or 
dependents recommended by political service and local 
attachment." Now Burke would certainly not have 
recommended Crabbe for the post if he had found in 
his protege any such defects of breeding or social tact 
as would have made his society distasteful to the Duke 
and Duchess. Burke, as we have seen, described him 
on their first acquaintance as having " the mind and 
feelings of a gentleman." Thurlow, it is true, after one 
of Crabbe's earlier interviews, had declared with an 
oath {more suo) that he was "as like Parson Adams 
as twelve to a dozen." But Thurlow was not merely 
jesting. He knew that Fielding's immortal clergyman 
had also the "mind and feelings of a gentleman," 
although his simplicity and ignorance of the world put 
him at many social disadvantages. It was probably 
the same obvious difference in Crabbe from the com- 
mon type of nobleman's chaplain of that day which 
made Crabbe's position at Belvoir, as his son admits, 
full of difficulties. It is quite possible and even 
natural that the guests and visitors at the Castle did 
not always accept Crabbe's talents as making up for a 
certain want of polish — or even perhaps for a want 
of deference to their opinions in conversation. The 
" pampered menials " moreover would probably resent 
having " to say Amen '^ to a newly-discovered literary 
adventurer from the great metropolis. 

In any case Crabbe's experience of a chaplain's life 
at Belvoir was not, by his son's admission, a happy 
one. "The numberless allusions," he writes, "to the 



III.] FRIENDSHIP WITH BURKE 43 

nature of a literary dependent's existence in a great 
lord's house, Avhich occur in my father's writings, and 
especially in the tale of The Patron, are, however, quite 
enough to lead any one who knew his character and 
feelings to the conclusion that notwithstanding the 
kindness and condescension of the Duke and Duchess 
themselves — which were, I believe, uniform, and of 
which he always spoke with gratitude — the situation 
he filled at Belvoir was attended with many painful 
circumstances, and productive in his mind of some of 
the acutest sensations of wounded pride that have ever 
been traced by any pen." It is not necessary to hold 
Crabbe himself entirely irresponsible for this result. 
His son, with a frankness that marks the Biography 
throughout, does not conceal that his father's temper, 
even in later life, was intolerant of contradiction, 
and he probably expressed his opinions before the 
guests at Belvoir with more vehemence than prudence. 
But if the rebuffs he met with were long remembered, 
they taught him something of value, and enlarged that 
stock of worldly wisdom so prominent in his later 
writings. In the story of The Patron, the young 
student living as the rich man's guest is advised by 
his father as to his behaviour with a fulness of detail 
obviously derived from Crabbe's own recollections of 
his early deficiencies : — 

" Thou art Religion's advocate — take heed. 
Hurt not the cause thy pleasure 'tis to plead ; 
With wine before thee, and with wits beside, 
Do not in strength of reasoning powers confide ; 
What seems to thee convincing, certain, plain. 
They will deny and dare thee to maintain ; 
And thus will triumph o'er thy eager youth. 
While thou wilt grieve for so disgracing truth. 



44 CRABBE [chap. 

With pain I've seen, these wrangling wits among, 
Faith's weak defenders, passionate and young : 
Weak thou art not, yet not enough on guard 
Where wit and humour keep their watch and ward : 
Men gay and noisy will o'erwhelm thy sense, 
Then loudly laugh at Truth's and thy expense : 
While the kind ladies will do all they can 
To check their mirth, and cry ' The good young man / ' " 

Meantime there were alleviations of the poet's lot. 
If the guests of the house Avere not always convinced by 
his arguments and the servants did not disguise their 
contempt, the Duke and Duchess were kind, and made 
him their friend. Nor was the Duke without an in- 
telligent interest in Crabbe's own subjects. Moreover, 
among the visitors at Belvoir were many who shared 
that interest to the full, such as the Duke of Queens- 
berry, Lord Lothian, Bishop Watson, and the eccentric 
Dr. Eobert Grlynn. Again, it was during Crabbe's 
residence at Belvoir that the Duke's brother. Lord 
Eobert Manners, died of wounds received while lead- 
ing his ship. Resolution, against the French in the 
West Indies, in the April of 1782. Crabbe's sympathy 
with the family, shown in his tribute to the sailor- 
brother appended to the poem he was then bringing to 
completion, still further strengthened the tie between 
them. Crabbe accompanied the Duke to London soon 
after, to assist him in arranging with Stothard for 
a picture to be painted of the incident of Lord 
Eobert's death. It was during this visit that Crabbe 
received the following letter from Burke. The let- 
ter is undated, but belongs to the month of May, 
for The Village was published in that month, and 
Burke clearly refers to that poem as just received, but 
as yet unread. Crabbe seems to have been for the 



III.] FRIENDSHIP WITH BURKE 45 

time off duty, and to have proposed a short visit to 
the Burkes : — 

"Dear Sir,— I do not know by what unlucky accident 
you missed the note I left for you at my house. I wrote 
besides to you at Belvoir. If you had received these two 
short letters you could not want an invitation to a place 
where every one considers himself as infinitely honoured and 
pleased by your presence. Mrs. Burke desires her best 
compliments, and trusts that you will not let the holidays 
pass over without a visit from you. I have got the poem ; 
but I have not yet opened it. I don't like the unhappy 
language you use about these matters. You do not easily 
please such a judgment as your own — that is natural ; but 
where you are difficult every one else will be charmed. I am, 
my dear sir, ever most affectionately yours, 

"Edmund Burke." 

The "unhappy language" seems to point to Crabbe 
having expressed some diffidence or forebodings con- 
cerning his new venture. Yet Crabbe had less to fear 
on this head than with most of his early poems. The 
Village had been schemed and composed in parts 
before Crabbe knew Burke. One passage in it indeed, 
as we have seen, had first convinced Burke that the 
writer was a poet. And in the interval that followed 
the poem had been completed and matured with a 
care that Crabbe seldom afterwards bestowed upon 
his productions. Burke himself had suggested and 
criticised much during its progress, and the manuscript 
had further been submitted through Sir Joshua 
Eeynolds to Johnson, who not only revised it in 
detail but re-wrote half a dozen of the opening lines. 
Johnson's opinion of the poem was conveyed to 
Eeynolds in the following letter, and here at last we 
get a date : — 



46 CRABBE [chap. 

" March 4, 1783. 
"Sir, — I have sent you back Mr. Crabbe's poem, which I 
read with great delight. It is original, vigorous, and elegant. 
The alterations which I have made I do not require him to 
adopt ; for my lines are perhaps not often better than his 
own : but he may take mine and his own together, and 
perhaps between them produce something better than either. 
He is not to think his copy wantonly defaced : a wet sponge 
will wash all the red lines away and leave the pages clean. 
His dedication will be least liked : it were better to contract 
it into a short, sprightly address. I do not doubt of Mr. 
Crabbe's success. I am, Sir, your most humble servant, 

" Samuel Johnson." 

BoswelFs comment on this incident is as follows: 
" The sentiments of Mr. Crabbe's admirable poem as to 
the false notions of rustic happiness and rustic virtue 
were quite congenial with Dr. Johnson's own : and he 
took the trouble not only to suggest slight corrections 
and variations, but to furnish some lines when he 
thought he could give the writer's meaning better than 
in the words of the manuscript." Boswell went on to 
observe that " the aid given by Johnson to the poem, 
as to The Traveller and Deserted Village of Goldsmith, 
were so small as by no means to impair the dis- 
tinguished merit of the author." There were un- 
friendly critics, however, in Crabbe's native county 
who professed to think otherwise, and "whispered 
that the manuscript had been so cobbled by Burke and 
Johnson that its author did not know it again when 
returned to him." On which Crabbe's son rejoins that 
" if these kind persons survived to read The Parish 
Register their amiable conjectures must have received 
a sufficient rebuke." 

This confident retort is not wholly just. There can 
be no doubt that some special mannerisms and defects 



III.] FRIENDSHIP WITH BURKE 47 

of Crabbe's later style had been kept in check by the 
wise revision of his friends. And again, when after 
more than twenty years Crabbe produced The Parish 
Register, that poem, as we shall see, had received from 
Charles James Fox something of the same friendly 
revision and suggestion as Tlie Village had received 
from Burke and Johnson. 

Tlie Village, in quarto, published by J. Dodsley, 
Pall Mall, appeared in May 1783, and at once at- 
tracted attention by novel qualities. Among these 
was the bold realism of the village-life described, and 
the minute painting of the scenery among which it 
was led. Cowper had published his first volume a 
year before, but thus far it had failed to excite general 
interest, and had met with no sale. Burns had as 
yet published nothing. But two poetic masterpieces, 
dealing with the joys and sorrows of village folk, 
were fresh in Englishmen's memory. One was The 
Elegy in a Country Churchyard, the other was Tlie 
Deserted Village. Both had left a deep impression 
upon their readers — and with reason — for two poems, 
more certain of immortality, because certain of giving 
a pleasure that cannot grow old-fashioned, do not 
exist in our literature. Each indeed marked an ad- 
vance upon all that English descriptive or didactic 
poets had thus far contributed towards making humble 
life and rural scenery attractive — unless we except 
the Allegro of Milton and some passages in Thomson's 
Seasons. Nor was it merely the consummate work- 
manship of Gray and Goldsmith that had made their 
popularity. The genuineness of the pathos in the 
two poems was beyond suspicion, although with Gray 
it was blended with a melancholy that was native to 



48 CRABBE [chap. 

himself. Although their authors had not been brought 
into close personal relations with the joys and sorrows 
dealt with, there was nothing of sentiment, in any 
unworthy sense, in either poet's treatment of his theme. 
But the result of their studies of humble village life 
was to produce something quite distinct from the 
treatment of the realist. What they saw and re- 
membered had passed through the transfiguring medium 
of a poet's imagination before it reached the reader. 
The finished product, like the honey of the bee, was 
due to the poet as well as to the flower from which 
he had derived the raw material. 

It seems to have been generally assumed when 
Crabbe's Village appeared, that it was of the nature of 
a rejoinder to Goldsmith's poem, and the fact that 
Crabbe quotes a line from The Deserted Village, "Passing 
rich on forty pounds a year," in his own description of 
the village parson, might seem to confirm that impres- 
sion. But the opening lines of TJie Village point to a 
different origin. It was rather during those early 
years when George's father read aloud to his family 
the pastorals of the so-called Augustan age of English 
poetry, that the boy was first struck with the unreality 
and consequent worthlessness of the conventional 
pictures of rural life. And in the opening lines of T7ie 
Village he boldly challenges the judgment of his readers 
on this head. The "pleasant land" of the pastoral 
poets was one of which George Crabbe, not unjustly, 
" thought scorn." 

" The village life, and every care that reigns 
O'er youthful peasants and declining swains, 
What labour yields, and what, that labour past, 
Age, in its hour of languor, finds at last ; 



III.] FRIENDSHIP WITH BURKE 49 

What form the real picture of the poor, 
Demand a song — the Muse can give no more. 

Fled are tliose times when in harmonious strains 
The rustic poet praised his native plains : 
No shepherds now, in smooth alternate verse. 
Their country's beauty or their nymphs' rehearse ; 
Yet still for these we frame the tender strain, 
Still in our lays fond Corydons complain, 
And shepherds' boys tlieir amorous pains reveal, 
The only pains, alas ! they never feel." 

At this point follow the six lines which Johnson had 
substituted for the author's. Crabbe had written : — 

" In fairer scenes, where peaceful pleasures spring, 
Tityrus, the pride of Mantuan swains, might sing : 
But charmed by him, or smitten with his views. 
Shall modern poets court the Mantuan muse ? 
From Truth and Nature shall we widely stray. 
Where Fancy leads, or Virgil led the way ? " 

Johnson substituted the following^ and Crabbe ac- 
cepted the revised version : — 

" On Mincio's banks, in Cesar's bounteous reign, 
If Tityrus found the Golden Age again, 
Must sleepy bards the flattering dream prolong, 
Mechanic echoes of the Mantuan song ? 
From Truth and Nature shall we widely stray, 
Where Virgil, not where Fancy, leads the way ? " 

The first four lines of Johnson are beyond question 
an improvement, and it is worth remark in passing 
how in the fourth line he has anticipated Cowper's 
" made poetry a mere mechanic art." 

But in the concluding couplet, Crabbe's meaning 
seems to lose in clearness through the change. Crabbe 
intended to ask whether it was safe to desert truth and 
nature for one's own self-pleasing fancies, even though 



50 CRABBE [chap. 

Virgil had set the example. Johnson's version seems 
to obscure rather than to make clearer this interpreta- 
tion. Crabbe, after this protest against the conven- 
tional, which, if unreal at the outset, had become a 
thousand times more wearisome by repetition, passes 
on to a daring presentation of real life lived among all 
the squalor of actual poverty, not unskilfully inter- 
spersed with descriptions equally faithful of the barren 
coast-scenery among which he had been brought up. 
It has been already remarked how Crabbe's eye for 
rural nature had been quickened and made more exact 
by his studies in botany. There was little in the 
poetry then popular that reproduced an actual scene as 
perfectly as do the following lines : — 

" Lo ! where tlie heath, with withering brake grown o'er, 
Lends the light turf that warms the neighbouring poor ; 
From thence a length of burning sand appears, 
Where the thin harvest waves its withered ears ; 
Rank weeds, that every art and care defy, 
Reign o'er the land, and rob the blighted rye : 
There thistles stretch their prickly arms afar. 
And to the ragged infant threaten war ; 
There poppies nodding, mock the hope of toil ; 
There the blue bugloss paints the sterile soil ; 
Hardy and high above the slender sheaf 
The slimy mallow waves her silky leaf ; 
O'er the young shoot the charlock throws a shade, 
And clasping tares cling round the sickly blade ; 
With mingled tints the rocky coasts abound, 
And a sad splendour vainly shines around." 

Crabbe here perceives the value, as Goldsmith had 
done before him, of village scenery as a background to 
his picture of village life. It suited Goldsmith's pur- 
pose to describe the ideal rural community, happy, 
prosperous, and innocent, as contrast with that de- 



III.] FRIENDS HIP WITH BURKE 51 

population of villages and corruption of peasant life 
which he predicted from the growing luxury and 
selfishness of the rich. But notwithstanding the title 
of the poem, it is Auburn in its pristine condition that 
remains in our memories. The dominant thought 
expressed is the virtue and the happiness that belong 
by nature to village life. Crabbe saw that this was 
no less idyllic and unreal, or at least incomplete, than 
the pictures of shepherd life presented in the faded 
copies of Theocritus and Virgil that had so long 
satisfied the English readers of poetry. There was no 
unreality in Goldsmith's design. They were not 
fictitious and " lucrative " tears that he shed. For his 
object was to portray an English rural village in its 
idea^lit}^ — rural loveliness — enshrining rural innocence 
and joy — and to show how man's vices, invading it from 
the outside, might bring all to ruin. Crabbe' s purpose 
was different. He aimed to awaken pity and sympathy 
for rural sins and sorrows with which he had himself 
been in closest touch, and which sprang from causes 
always in operation within the heart of the community 
itself, and not to be attributed to the insidious attacks 
from without. Goldsmith, for example, drew an im- 
mortal picture of the village pastor, closely modelled 
upon Chaucer's "poor parson of a town," his piety, 
humility, and never failing goodness to his flock : — 

" Thus to reUeve the wretched was his pride, 
And even his failings leaned to virtue's side ; 
But in his duty prompt at every call 
He watched and wept, he prayed and felt for all. 
And as a bird each fond endearment tries 
To tempt its new-fledged offspring to the skies, 
He tried each art, reproved each dull delay, 
Allured to brighter Nvorlds, and led the way." 



52 CRABBE [chap. 

Crabbe remembered a different type of parish priest 
in his boyhood, and this is how he introduces him. 
He has been describing, with an unmitigated realism, 
the village poorhouse, in all its squalor and dilapida- 
tion : — 

" There children dwell who know no parents' care : 
Parents, who know no children's love, dwell there. 
Heart-broken matrons on their joyless bed, 
Forsaken wives, and mothers never wed." 

The dying pauper needs some spiritual consolation 
ere he passes into the unseen world, 

"But ere his death some pious doubts arise, 
Some simple fears which bold, bad men despise ; 
Fain would he ask the parish priest to prove 
His title certain to the joys above : 
For this he sends the murmuring nurse, who calls 
The holy stranger to these dismal walls ; 
And doth not he, the pious man, appear, 
He, ' passing rich with forty pounds a year ' ? 
Ah ! no : a shepherd of a different stock. 
And far unlike him, feeds this little flock : 
A jovial youth, who thinks his Sunday's task 
As much as God or man can fairly ask ; 
The rest he gives to loves and labours light. 
To fields the morning, and to feasts the night ; 
None better skilled the noisy pack to guide, 
To urge their chase, to cheer them or to chide ; 
A sportsman keen, he shoots through half the day, 
And, skilled at whist, devotes the night to play : 
Then, while such honours bloom around his head, 
Shall he sit sadly by the sick man's bed, 
To raise the hope he feels not, or with zeal 
To combat fears that e'en the pious feel ? " 

Crabbe' s son, after his father's death, cited in a note 



m.] FRIENDSHIP WITH BURKE 53 

on these lines what he held to be a parallel passage 
from Cowper's Progress of Error, beginning : — 
" Oh, laugh or mourn with me the rueful jest, 
A cassocked huntsman, and a fiddling priest." 

Cowper's first volume, containing Table-Talk and 
its companion satires, appeared some months before 
Crabbe's Village. The shortcomings of the clergy are a 
favourite topic with him, and a varied gallery of the 
existing types of clerical inefficiency may be formed 
from his pages. Many of Cowper's strictures were 
amply justified by the condition of the English 
Church. But Cowper's method is not Crabbe's. The 
note of the satirist is seldom absent, blended at times 
with just a suspicion of that of the Pharisee. The 
humorist and the Puritan contend for predomi- 
nance in the breast of this polished gentleman and 
scholar. Cowper's friend, Newton, in the Preface 
he wrote for his first volume, claimed for the poet that 
his satire was "benevolent." But it was not always 
discriminating or just. The satirist's keen love of 
antithesis often weakens the moral virtue of Cowper's 
strictures. In this earliest volume anger was more 
conspicuous than sorrow, and contempt perhaps more 
obvious than either. The callousness of public opinion 
on many subjects needed other medicine than this. 
Hence was it perhaps that Cowper's volume, which 
appeared in May 1782, failed to awaken interest. 
Crabbe's Village appeared just a year later (it had been 
completed a year or two earlier), and at once made its 
mark. "It was praised," writes his son, "in the 
leading journals; the sale was rapid and extensive; 
and my father's reputation was by universal consent 
greatly raised, and permanently established, by this 



54 CRABBE [chap, hi.] 

poem." The number of anonymous letters it brought 
the author, some of gratitude, and some of resentment 
(for it had laid its finger on many sores in the body- 
politic), showed how deeply his touch had been felt. 
Further publicity for the poem was obtained by Burke, 
who inserted the description of the Parish Workhouse 
and the Village Apothecary in The Annual Register, 
which he controlled. The same pieces were included a 
few years later by Vicesimus Knox in that excellent 
Miscellany Elegant Extracts. And Crabbe was to 
learn in later life from Walter Scott how, when a 
youth of eighteen, spending a snowy winter in a lonely 
country-house, he fell in with the volume of The 
Annual Register containing the passages from Tlie 
Village; how deeply they had sunk into his heart; 
and that (writing then to Crabbe in the year 1809) he 
could repeat them still from memory. 

Edmund Burke's friend, Edward Shackleton, meeting 
Crabbe at Burke's house soon after the publication of 
the poem, paid him an elegant tribute. Goldsmith's, 
he said, would now be the " deserted " village. Crabbe 
modestly disclaimed the compliment, and assuredly 
with reason. Goldsmith's delightful poem will never 
be deserted. For it is no less good and wise to dwell 
on village life as it might be, than to reflect on what it 
has suffered from man's inhumanity to man. What 
made Crabbe a new force in English poetry, was that 
in his verse Pity appears, after a long oblivion, as the 
true antidote to Sentimentalism. The reader is not 
put off with pretty imaginings, but is led up to the 
object which the poet would show him, and made to 
feel its horror. If Crabbe is our first great realist 
in verse, he uses his realism in the cause of a true 
humanity. Facit indignatio versum. 



CHAPTER IV 

LIFE AT BELVOIR CASTLE AND AT MUSTON 

(1783-1792) 

''The sudden popularity of Tlie Village/' writes 
Crabbe's son and biographer, "must have produced, 
after the numberless slights and disappointments 
already mentioned, and even after the tolerable suc- 
cess of The Library, about as strong a revulsion in my 
father's mind as a ducal chaplaincy in his circum- 
stances; but there was no change in his temper or 
manners. The successful author continued as modest 
as the rejected candidate for publication had been 
patient and long-suffering." The biographer might 
have remarked as no less strange that the success of 
TJie Village failed, for the moment at least, to convince 
Crabbe where his true strength lay. When he again 
published a poem, two years later, he reverted to the 
old Popian topics and methods in a by no means 
successful didactic satire on newspapers. Meantime 
the occasional visits of the Duke of Rutland and his 
family to London brought the chaplain again in touch 
with the Burkes and the friends he had first made 
through them, notably with Sir Joshua Reynolds. He 
was also able to visit the theatre occasionally, and 
fell imder the spell, not only of Mrs. Siddons, but of 
Mrs. Jordan (in the character of Sir Harry Wildair). 
It was now decided that as a nobleman's chaplain it 
would be well for him to have a university degree, 

55 



56 CRABBE [chap. 

and to this end his name was entered on the boards 
of Trinity College, Cambridge, through the good 
offices of Bishop Watson of Llandaff, with a view to 
his obtaining a degree without residence. This was 
in 1783, but almost immediately afterwards he received 
an LL.B. degree from the Archbishop of Canterbury. 
This was obtained for Crabbe in order that he might 
hold two small livings in Dorsetshire, Frome St. 
Quintin and Evershot, to which he had just been 
presented by Thurlow. It was on this occasion that 
the Chancellor made his memorable comparison of 
Crabbe to Parson Adams, no doubt pointing to a 
certain rusticity, and possibly provincial accent, from 
which Crabbe seems never to have been wholly free. 
This promotion seems to have interfered very little with 
Crabbe's residence at Belvoir or in London. A curate 
was doubtless placed in one or other of the parsonage- 
houses in Dorsetshire at such modest stipend as was 
then usual — often not more than thirty pounds a year — 
and the rector would content himself with a periodical 
flying visit to receive tithe, or inquire into any parish 
grievances that may have reached his ear. As inci- 
dents of this kind will be not infrequent during the 
twenty years that follow in Crabbe's clerical career, it 
may be well to intimate at once that no peculiar 
blame attaches to him in the matter. He but 
" partook of the frailty of his times." During these 
latter years of the eighteenth century, as for long 
before and after, pluralism in the Church was rather 
the rule than the exception, and in consequence non- 
residence was recognised as inevitable, and hardly 
matter for comment. The two Dorsetshire livings 
were of small value, and as Crabbe was now looking 



IV.] LIFE AT BELVOIR CASTLE 57 

forward to his marriage with the faithful Miss Ehuy, 
he could not have afforded to reside. He may not, 
however, have thought it politic to decline the first 
preferment offered by so important a dispenser of 
patronage as the Lord Chancellor. 

Events, however, were at hand, which helped to 
determine Crabbe's immediate future. Early in 1784 
the Duke of Rutland became Lord Lieutenant of 
Ireland. The appointment had been made some time 
before, and it had been decided that Crabbe was not 
to be on the Castle staff. His son expresses no sur- 
prise at this decision, and makes of it no grievance. 
The duke and the chaplain parted excellent friends. 
Crabbe and his wife were to remain at Belvoir as long 
as it suited their convenience, and the duke undertook 
that he would not forget him as regarded future pre- 
ferment. On the strength of these offers, Crabbe and 
Miss Elmy were married in December 1783, in the 
parish church of Beccles, where Miss Elmy's mother 
resided, and a few weeks later took up their abode in 
the rooms assigned them at Belvoir Castle. 

As Miss Elmy had lived for many years with her 
uncle and aunt, Mr. and Mrs. John Tovell, at Parham, 
and moreover as this rural inland village played a con- 
siderable part in the development of Crabbe's poetical 
faculty, it may be well to quote his son's graphic 
account of the domestic circumstances of Miss Elmy's 
relatives. Mr. Tovell was, like Mr. Hathaway, "a 
substantial yeoman," for he owned an estate of some 
eight hundred a year, to some share of which, as the 
Tovells had lost their only child, Miss Elmy would 
certainly in due course succeed. The Tovells' house at 
Parham, which has been long ago pulled down, and 



58 CRABBE [chap. 

rebuilt as Parliam Lodge, on very different lines, was 
of ample size, with its moat, so common a feature of 
the homestead in the eastern counties, '^ rookery, dove- 
cot, and fish-ponds " ; but the surroundings were those 
of the ordinary farmhouse, for Mr. Tovell himself 
cultivated part of his estate. 

" The drawing-room, a corresponding dining-parlour, 
and a handsome sleeping apartment upstairs, were all 
tabooed ground, and made use of on great and solemn 
occasions only — such as rent-days, and an occasional 
visit with which Mr. Tovell was honoured by a neigh- 
bouring peer. At all other times the family and their 
visitors lived entirely in the old-fashioned kitchen 
along with the servants. My great-uncle occupied an 
armchair, or, in attacks of gout, a couch on one side of 
a large open chimney. ... At a very early hour in 
the morning the alarum called the maids, and their 
mistress also ; and if the former were tardy, a louder 
alarum, and more formidable, was heard chiding their 
delay — not that scolding was peculiar to any occasion ; 
it regularly ran on through all the day, like bells on 
harness, inspiriting the work, whether it were done 
well or ill." In the annotated volume of the son's 
memoir which belonged to Edward FitzGerald, the 
writer added the following detail as to his great-aunt's 
temper and methods: "A wench whom Mrs. Tovell 
had pursued with something weightier than invective 
— a ladle, I think — whimpered out ' If an angel from 
Hiv'n were to come mawther ' " (Suffolk for girl) " ^ to 
missus, she wouldn't give no satisfaction.' '^ 

George Crabbe the younger, who gives this graphic 
account of the menage at Parham, was naturally 
anxious to claim for his mother, who so long formed 



IV.] LIFE AT BELVOIR CASTLE 59 

one of this queer liouseliold, a degree of refinement 
superior to that of her surroundings. After describing 
the daily dinner-party in the kitchen — master, mis- 
tress, servants, with an occasional " travelling rat- 
catcher or tinker " — he skilfully points out that his 
mother's feelings must have resembled those of the 
boarding-school miss in his father's " Widow's Tale " 
when subjected to a like experience : — 

"But when the men beside their station took, 
The maidens with them, and with these the cook ; 
When one huge wooden bowl before them stood, 
Filled with huge balls of farinaceous food ; 
With bacon, mass saline ! where never lean 
Beneath the brown and bristly rind was seen : 
When from a single horn the party drew 
Their copious draughts of heavy ale and new ; 
When the coarse cloth she saw, with many a stain, 
Soiled by rude hinds who cut and came again — 
She could not breathe, but with a heavy sigh, 
Reined the fair neck, and shut th' offended eye ; 
She minced the sanguine flesh in frustums fine. 
And wondered much to see the creatures dine 1 ' ' 

The home of the Tovells has long disappeared, and 
it must not therefore be confused with the more 
remarkable " moated grange " in Parham, originally 
the mansion of the Willoughbys, though now a farm- 
house, boasting a fine Tudor gateway and other 
fragments of fifteenth and sixteenth century work. 
An engraving of the Hall and moat, after Stanfield, 
forms an illustration to the third volume of the 1834 
edition of Crabbe. 

When Crabbe began Tlie Village, it was clearly 
intended to be, like The Borough later, a picture 
of Aldeburgh and its inhabitants. Yet not only Parham 



60 CRABBE [chap. 

but the country about Bel voir crept in before the poem 
was completed. If the passage in Book I. beginning — 

" Lo! where the heath, with withering brake grown o'er," 

describes pure x\ldeburgh, the opening lines of Book 
II., ta,king a more roseate view of rural happiness — 

" I, too, must yield, that oft amid those woes 
Are gleams of transient mirth and hours of sweet repose, 
Such as you find on yonder sportive Green, 
The squire's tall gate, and church way-walk between, 
Where loitering stray a little tribe of friends 
On a fair Sunday when the sermon ends," 

are drawn from the pleasant villages in the Midlands 
(perhaps Allington, where he was afterwards to min- 
ister), whither he rambled on his botanising excursions 
from Belvoir Castle. 

George Crabbe and his bride settled down in their 
apartments at Belvoir Castle, but difficulties soon 
arose. Crabbe was Avithout definite clerical occupation, 
unless he read prayers to the few servants left in 
charge ; and was simply waiting for Avhatever might 
turn up in the way of preferment from the Manners 
family, or from the Lord Chancellor. The young 
couple soon found the position intolerable, and after 
less than eighteen months Crabbe wisely accepted a 
vacant curacy in the neighbourhood, that of Stathern in 
Leicestershire, to the humble parsonage of which parish 
Crabbe and his wife removed in 1785. A child had 
been born to them at Belvoir, who survived its birth 
only a few hours. During the following four years at 
Stathern were born three other children — the two 
sons, George and John, in 1785 and 1787, and a 
daughter in 1789, who died in infancy. 



IV.] LIFE AT BELVOIR CASTLE 61 

Stathern is a village about four miles from Belvoir 
Castle, and the drive or walk from one to the other 
lies through the far-spreading woods and gardens sur- 
rounding the ducal mansion. Crabbe entered these 
woods almost at his very door, and found there ample 
opportunity for his botanical studies, which were still 
his hobby. As usual his post was that of locum tenens, 
the rector. Dr. Thomas Parke, then residing at his 
other living at Stamford. My friend, the Eev. J. W. 
Taylor, the present rector of Stathern, who entered 
on his duties in 1866, tells me of one or two of the 
village traditions concerning Crabbe. One of these 
is to the effect that he spoke "through his nose," 
which I take to have been the local explanation of 
a marked Suffolk accent which accompanied the poet 
through life. Another, that he was peppery of temper, 
and that an exceedingly youthful couple having pre- 
sented themselves for holy matrimony, Crabbe drove 
them with scorn from the altar, with the remark that 
he had come there to marry "men and women, and 
not lads and wenches ! " 

Crabbe used to tell his children that the four years 
at Stathern were, on the whole, the happiest in his 
life. He and his wife were in humble quarters, but 
they were their own masters, and they were quit of 
" the pampered menial " for ever. " My mother and 
he," the son writes, "could now ramble together at 
their ease amidst the rich woods of Belvoir without 
any of the painful feelings which had before chequered 
his enjoyment of the place : at home a garden afforded 
him healthful exercise and unfailing amusement; and 
his situation as a curate prevented him from being 
drawn into any sort of unpleasant disputes with the 



62 CRABBE [chap. 

villagers about him " — an ambiguous statement which 
probably, however, means that the absent rector had 
to settle difficulties as to tithe, and other parochial 
grievances. Crabbe now again brought his old medical 
attainments, such as they Avere, to the aid of his poor 
parishioners, " and had often great difficulty in confining 
his practice strictly within the limits of the poor, for 
the farmers would willingly have been attended gratis 
also." His literary labours subsequent to Tlie Village 
seem to have been slight, with the exception of a brief 
memoir of Lord Eobert Manners contributed to The 
Annual Register in 1784, for the poem of The News- 
paper, published in 1785, was probably "old stock." 
It is unlikely that Crabbe, after the success of Tlie 
Village, should have willingly turned again to the old 
and unprofitable vein of didactic satire. But, the 
poem being in his desk, he perhaps thought that it 
might bring in a few pounds to a household which 
certainly needed them. "■ The Newspaper, a Poem, by 
the Rev. George Crabbe, Chaplain to his Grace the 
Duke of Rutland, printed for J. Dodsley, in Pall 
Mall," appeared as a quarto pamphlet (price 2s.) in 
1785, with a felicitous motto from Ovid's Metamor- 
phoses on the title-page, and a politic dedication to 
Lord Thurlow, evincing a gratitude for past favours, 
and (unexpressed) a lively sense of favours to 
come. 

The Neivsjjaper is, to say truth, of little value, 
either as throwing light on the journalism of Crabbe's 
day, or as a step in his poetic career. The topics are 
commonplace, such as the strange admixture of news, 
the interference of the newspaper with more useful 
reading, and the development of the advertiser's art. 



IV.] LIFE AT BELVOIR CASTLE 63 

It is written in the fluent and copious vein of mild 
satire and milder moralising which Crabbe from 
earliest youth had so assiduously practised. If a few 
lines are needed as a sample, the following will show 
that the ~ methods of literary puffing are not so origi- 
nal to-day as might be supposed. After indicating 
the tradesman's ingenuity in this respect, the poet 
adds : — 

' ' These are the arts by which a thousand live, 
Where Truth may smile, and Justice may forgive : 
But when, amid this rabble-rout, we find 
A puffing poet, to liis honour blind : 
Who slily drops quotations all about 
Packet or Post, and points their merit out ; 
Who advertises what reviewers say, 
With sham editions every second day ; 
Who dares not trust his praises out of sight. 
But hurries into fame with all his might ; 
Although the verse some transient praise obtains, 
Contempt is all the anxious poet gains." 

Tlie Nei(jspaper seems to have been coldly received 
by the critics, who had perhaps been led by Tlie Village 
to expect something very different, and Crabbe never 
returned to the satirical-didactic line. Indeed, for 
twenty-two years he published nothing more, although 
he wrote continuously, and as regularly committed the 
bulk of his manuscript to the domestic fire-place. 
Meantime he lived a happy country life at Stathern, 
studying botany, reading aloud to his wife, and by no 
means forgetting the wants of his poor parishioners. 
He visited periodically his Dorsetshire livings, introduc- 
ing his wife on one such occasion, as he passed through 
London, to the Burkes. And one day, seized with an 



64 CRABBE [chap. 

acute attack of the mal du i:)ays, he rode sixty miles to 
the coast of Lincolnshire that he might once more 
"dip/' as his son expresses it, "in the waves that 
washed the beach of Aldeburgh." 

In October 1787, Crabbe's household were startled 
by the news of the death of his friend and patron the 
Duke of Eutland, who died at the Yice-regal Lodge at 
Dublin, after a short illness, at the early age of thirty- 
three. The duke, an open-handed man and renowned 
for his extravagant hospitalities, had lived " not wisely 
but too well." Crabbe assisted at the funeral at Bel voir, 
and duly published his discourse then delivered in 
handsome quarto. Shortly after, the duchess, anxious 
to retain their former chaplain in the neighbourhood, 
gave Crabbe a letter to Thurlow, asking him to ex- 
change the two livings in Dorsetshire for two other, of 
more value, in the Vale of Belvoir. Crabbe waited on 
the Chancellor with the letter, but Thurlow was, or 
affected to be, annoyed by the request. It was a thing, 
he exclaimed with an oath, that he would not do "for 
any man in England." However, when the young and 
beautiful duchess later appealed to him in person, he 
relented, and presented Crabbe to the two livings of 
Muston in Leicestershire, and Allington in Lincoln- 
shire, both within sight of Belvoir Castle, and (as the 
crow flies) not much more than a mile apart. To the 
rectory house of Muston, Crabbe brought his family 
in February 1789. His connection with the two 
livings was to extend over five and twenty years, but 
during thirteen of these years, as will be seen, he was 
a non-resident. For the present he remained three 
years at the small and very retired village of Muston, 
about five miles from Grantham. " The house in 



IV.] AT MUSTON 65 

which Crabbe lived at Miiston," writes Mr. Hutton,^ 
^' is now pulled down. It is replaced by one built 
higher up a slight hill, in a position intended, says 
scandal, to prevent any view of Belvoir. Crabbe with 
all his ironies had no such resentful feelings ; indeed 
more modern successors of his have opened what he 
would have called a 'vista,' and the castle again crowns 
the distance as you look southward from the pretty 
garden." 

Crabbe's first three years of residence at Muston 
were marked by few incidents. Another son, Edmund, 
was born in the autumn of 1790, and a few weeks 
later a series of visits were paid by Crabbe, his wife 
and elder boy, to their relations at Aldeburgh, 
Parham, and Beccles, from which latter town, accord- 
ing to Crabbe's son, they visited Lowestoft, and 
were so fortunate as to hear the aged John Wesley 
preach, on a memorable occasion when he quoted 
Anacreon : — 

" Oft am I by women told, 
Poor Anacreon ! thou grow'st old. 



But this I need not to be told, 
'Tis time to live, if I grow old." 

In 1792 Crabbe preached at the bishop's visitation at 
Grantham, and his sermon was so much admired that 
he was invited to receive into his house as pupils the 
sons of the Earl of Bute. This task, however, Crabbe 
rightly declined, being diffident as to his scholarship. 

1 See a pleasant paper on Crahbe at Muston and Allington by 
the Rev. W. H. Hutton of St. John's College, Oxford, in the Corn- 
hill Magazine for June 1901. 

F 



66 CRABBE [chap. 

In October of this year Crabbe was again working 
hard at his botany — for like the Friar in Romeo and 
Juliet his time was always much divided between the 
counselling of young couples and the " culling of 
simples " — when his household received the tidings 
of the death of John Tovell of Parham, after a brief 
illness. It was momentous news to Crabbe's family, 
for it involved " good gifts," and many " possibilities." 
Crabbe was left executor, and as Mr. Tovell had died 
without children, the estate fell to his two sisters, 
Mrs. Elmy and an elderl}^ spinster sister residing in 
Parham. As Mrs. Elmy's share of the estate would 
come to her children, and as the unmarried sister 
died not long after, leaving her portion in the same 
direction, Crabbe's anxiety for the pecuniary future 
of his family was at an end. He visited Parham on 
executor's business, and on his return found that he 
had made up his mind '' to place a curate at Muston, 
and to go and reside at Parham, taking the charge of 
some church in that neighbourhood." 

Crabbe's son, with the admirable frankness that 
marks his memoir throughout, does not conceal that 
this step in his father's life was a mistake, and that he 
recognised and regretted it as such on cooler reflection. 
The comfortable home of the Tovells at Parham fell 
somehow, whether by the will, or by arrangement 
with Mrs. Elmy, to the disposal of Crabbe, and he was 
obviously tempted by its ampler room and pleasant 
surroundings. He would be once more among rela- 
tives and acquaintances, and a social circle congenial to 
himself and his wife. Muston must have been very 
dull and lonely, except for those on visiting terms with 
the duke and other county magnates. Moreover it 



IV.] AT MUSTON 67 

is likely that the relations of Crabbe with his village 
flock were already — as we know they were at a later 
date — somewhat strained. Let it be said once for all 
that judged by the standards of clerical obligation 
current in 1792, Crabbe was then, and remained all 
his life, in many important respects, a diligent parish- 
priest. Mr. Hutton justly remarks that " the intimate 
knowledge of the life of the poor which his poems show 
proves how constantly he must have visited, no less 
than how closely he must have observed." But the 
fact remains that though he was kind and helpful to 
his flock while among them in sickness and in trouble 
— their physician as well as their spiritual adviser — his 
ideas as to clerical absenteeism were those of his age, 
and moreover his preaching to the end of his life was 
not of a kind to arouse much interest or zeal." I have 
had access to a large packet of his manuscript sermons, 
preached during his residence in Suffolk and later, 
as proved by the endorsements on the cover, at his 
various incumbencies in Leicestershire and Wiltshire. 
They consist of plain and formal explanations of his 
text, reinforced by other texts, entirely orthodox but 
unrelieved by any resource in the way of illustra- 
tion, or by any of those poetic touches which his 
published verse shows he had at his command. A 
sermon lies before me, preached first at Great 
Glemham in 1801, and afterwards at Little Glem- 
ham, SwefO-ing, Muston, and Allington; at Trow- 
bridge in 1820, and again at Trowbridge in 
1830. The preacher probably held his discourses 
quite as x^rofitable at one stage in the Church's 
development as at another. In this estimate of 
clerical responsibilities Crabbe seems to have remained 



68 CRABBE [chap. 

stationary. But meantime the laity had been aroused 
to expect better things. The ferment of the Wesley 
and Whitefield Revival was spreading slowly but 
surely even among the remote villages of England. 
What Crabbe and the bulk of the parochial clergy 
called "a sober and rational conversion" seemed to 
those who had fallen under the fervid influence of the 
great Methodist a savourless and ineffectual formality. 
The extravagances of the Movement had indeed 
travelled everywhere in company with its worthier 
fruits. Enthusiasm, — " an excellent good word until 
it was ill-sorted," — found vent in various shapes that 
were justly feared and suspected by many of the 
clergy, even by those to whom " a reasonable religion " 
was far from being "so very reasonable as to have 
nothing to do with the heart and affections." It was 
not only the Moderates who saw its danger. Wesley 
himself had found it necessary to caution his more 
impetuous followers against its eccentricities. And 
Joseph Butler preaching at the Rolls Chapel on " the 
Love of God " thought it well to explain that in his 
use of the phrase there was nothing "enthusiastical." 
But as one mischievous extreme generates another, the 
influence of the prejudice against enthusiasm became 
disastrous, and the word came too often to be con- 
founded with any and every form of religious fervency 
and earnestness. To the end of his days Crabbe, like 
many another, regarded sobriety and moderation in 
the expression of religious feeling as not only its chief 
safeguard but its chief ornament. It may seem 
strange that the poetic temperament which Crabbe 
certainly possessed never seemed to affect his views of 
life and human nature outside the fields of poetic 



IV.] AT MUSTON 69 

composition. He was notably indifferent, his son tells 
us, " to almost all the proper objects of taste. He had 
no real love for painting, or music, or architecture, or 
for what a painter's eye considers as the beauties of 
landscape. But he had a passion for science — the 
science of the human mind, first ; then, that of nature 
in general ; and lastly that of abstract qualities." 

If the defects here indicated help to explain some of 
those in his poetry, they may also throw light on a 
certain lack of imagination in Crabbe's dealings with 
his fellow-men in general and with his parishioners in 
particular. His temperament was somewhat tactless 
and masterful, and he could never easily place himself 
at the stand-point of those who differed from him. 
The use of his imagination was mainly confined to the 
hours in his study; and while there, if he had his 
^' beaux moments/' he had also his " mauvais quarts 
d'heureJ' 

Perhaps if he had brought a little imagination to 
bear upon his relations with Muston and Allington, 
Crabbe would not have deserted his people so soon 
after coming among them. The step made him many 
enemies. For here was no case of a poor curate 
accepting, for his family's sake, a more lucrative post. 
Crabbe was leaving the Vale of Belvoir because an 
accession of fortune had befallen the family, and it 
was pleasanter to live in Jiis native county and in a 
better house. So, at least, his action was interpreted 
at the time, and Crabbe's son takes no very different 
view. "Though tastes and affections, as well as 
worldly interests, prompted this return to native 
scenes and early acquaintances, it was a step re- 
luctantly taken, and I believe, sincerely repented of. 



70 CRABBE [chap, iv.] 

The beginning was ominous. As we were slowly 
quitting the place preceded by our furniture, a 
stranger, though one who knew my father's circum- 
stances, called out in an impressive tone, ' You are 
wrong, you are wrong ! ' " The sound, he afterwards 
admitted, found an echo in his own conscience, and 
during the whole journey seemed to ring in his ears 
" like a supernatural voice." 



CHAPTER V 

IN SUFFOLK AGAIN 

(1792-1805) 

On the arrival of the family at Parham, poor Crabbe 
discovered that even an accession of fortune had its 
attendant drawbacks. His son, George, records his 
own recollections (he was then a child of seven years) 
of the scene that met their view on their alighting at 
Parham Lodge. '^As I got out of the chaise, I re- 
member jumping for very joy, and exclaiming, ^Here 
we are, here we are — little Willy and all ! ' " — (his 
parents' seventh and youngest child, then only a few 
weeks old) — " but my spirits sunk into dismay when, 
on entering the well-known kitchen, all there seemed 
desolate, dreary, and silent. Mrs. Tovell and her 
sister-in-law, sitting by the fireside weeping, did not 
even rise up to welcome my parents, but uttered a 
few chilling words and wept again. All this appeared 
to me as inexplicable as forbidding. How little do 
children dream of the alterations that elder people's 
feelings towards each other undergo, when death has 
caused a transfer of property ! Our arrival in Suffolk 
was by no means palatable to all my mother's relations." 
Mr. Tovell's widow had doubtless her suitable join- 
ture, and probably a modest dower-residence to retire 
to ; but Parham Hall had to be vacated, and Crabbe, 

71 



72 CRABBE [chap. 

having purchased its furniture, at once entered on 
possession. The mere re-arrangement of the contents 
caused many heartburnings to the spinster-sister, 
who had known them under the old regime, and the 
alteration of the hanging of a picture would have 
made "Jacky," she averred, to turn in his grave. 
Crabbe seems, however, to have shown so much good- 
feeling and forbearance in the matter that the old 
lady, after grimly boasting that she could "screw 
Crabbe up and down like a fiddle," was ultimately 
friendly, and her share of her brother's estate came 
in due course to Crabbe and his wife. Moreover, the 
change of tenancy at the Hall was anything but satis- 
factory to the village generally. Mr. Tovell had been 
much given to hospitality, and that of a convivial sort. 
Such of the neighbours as were of kindred tastes had 
been in the habit of " dropping in " of an evening two 
or three times a week, when, if a quorum was present, a 
bowl of punch would be brewed, and sometimes a second 
and a third. The substitution for all this of the quiet 
and decorous family life of the Crabbe s was naturally 
a heavy blow and grave discouragement to the village 
reveller, and contributed to make Crabbe's life at 
starting far from happy. His pursuits and inclinations, 
literary as well as clerical, made such company dis- 
tasteful ; and his wife, who had borne him seven 
children in nine years, and of these had lost four in 
infancy, had little strength or heart for miscellaneous 
company. But there was compensation for her husband 
among the county gentry of the neighbourhood, and 
notably in the constant kindness of Dudley North, of 
Little Glemham Hall, the same friend who had helped 
him with money when twelve years before he had 



v.] IN SUFFOLK AGAIN 73 

left Aldeburgh, an almost penniless adventurer, to 
try his fortune in London. At Mr. North's table 
Crabbe had once more the opportunity of meeting 
members of the Whig party, whom he had known 
through Burke. On one such occasion Fox expressed 
his regret that Crabbe had ceased to write, and offered 
his help in revising any future poem that he might 
produce. The promise was not forgotten when ten 
years later The Parish liegister was in preparation. 

During his first year at Parham, Crabbe . does not 
appear to have undertaken any fixed clerical duties, 
and this interval of leisure allowed him to pay a long 
visit to his sister at Aldeburgh, and here he placed 
his two elder boys, George and John, at a dame 
school. On returning to Parham, he accepted the 
office of curate-in-charge at Sweffling, the rector. 
Rev. Richard Turner, being resident at his other 
living of Great Yarmouth. The curacy of Great 
Glemham, also within easy reach, was shortly added. 
Crabbe was still residing at Parham Lodge, but the 
incidents of such residence remained far from pleasant, 
and, after four years there, Crabbe joyfully accepted the 
offer of a good house at Great Glemham, placed at his 
disposal by his friend Dudley North. Here the family 
remained for a further period of four or five years. 

A fresh bereavement in his family had made Crabbe 
additionally anxious for change of scene and associations 
for his wife. In 1796, another child died — their third 
son, Edmund — in his sixth year. Two children, out of 
a family of seven, alone remained ; and this final blow 
proved more than the poor mother could bear unin- 
jured. From this time dated "a nervous disorder," 
which indeed meant a gradual decay of mental power, 



74 CRABBE [chap. 

from wliicli she never recovered ; and Crabbe, an ever- 
devoted liusband, tended her with exemplary care 
till her death in 1813. Southey, writing about Crabbe 
to his friend, Neville White, in 1808, adds : " It was 
not long before his wife became deranged, and when 
all this was told me by one who knew him well, five 
years ago, he was still almost confined in his own house, 
anxiously waiting upon this wife in her long and hope- 
less malady. A sad history ! It is no wonder that he 
gives so melancholy a picture of human life." 

Save for Mrs. Crabbe's broken health and increasing 
melancholy, the four years at Glemham were among 
the most peaceful and happiest of Crabbe's life. His 
son grows eloquent over the elegance of the house and 
the natural beauties of its situation. " A small well- 
wooded park occupied the whole mouth of the glen, 
whence, doubtless, the name of the village was derived. 
In the lowest ground stood the commodious mansion ; 
the approach wound down through a plantation on the 
eminence in front. The opposite hill rose at the back 
of it, rich and varied with trees and shrubs scattered 
irregularly ; under this southern hill ran a brook, and 
on the banks above it were spots of great natural 
beauty, crowned by whitethorn and oak. Here the 
purple scented violet perfumed the air, and in one 
place coloured the ground. On the left of the front 
in the narrower portion of the glen was the village; 
on the right, a confined view of richly wooded fields. 
In fact, the whole parish and neighbourhood resemble 
a combination of groves, interspersed with fields culti- 
vated like gardens, and intersected with those green 
dry lanes which tempt the walker in all weathers, 
especially in the evenings, when in the short grass of 



v.] IN SUFFOLK AGAIN 75 

the dry sandy banks lies every few yards a glowworm, 
and the nightingales are pouring forth their melody in 
every direction." 

It was not, therefore, for lack of acquaintance with 
the more idyllic side of English country-life that 
Crabbe, when he once more addressed the public in 
verse, turned to the less sunny memories of his youth 
for inspiration. It was not till some years after the 
appearance of The Parish Register and The Borough 
that the pleasant paths of inland Suffolk and of the 
Vale of Belvoir formed the background to his studies 
in human character. 

Meantime Crabbe was perpetually writing, and as 
constantly destroying what he wrote. His small flock 
at Great and Little Glemham employed part of his 
time ; the education of his two sons, who were now 
withdrawn from school, occupied some more ; and a 
wife in failing health was certainly not neglected. 
But the busy husband and father found time to teach 
himself something of French and Italian, and read 
aloud to his family of an evening as many books of 
travel and of fiction as his friends would keep him 
supplied with. He was preparing at the same time a 
treatise on botany, which was never to see the light ; 
and during " one or two of his winters in Suffolk," his 
son relates, " he gave most of his evening hours to the 
writing of novels, and he brought not less than three 
such works to a conclusion. The first was entitled 
^ The Widow Grey,' but I recollect nothing of it except 
that the principal character was a benevolent humorist, 
a Dr. Allison. The next was called ^ Eeginald Glan- 
shaw, or the Man who commanded Success,' a portrait 
of an assuming, over-bearing, ambitious mind, rendered 



76 CRABBE [chap. 

intoresting by some generous virtues, and gradually 
wearing down into idiotism. I cannot help thinking 
that this Glanshaw was drawn with very extraordi- 
nary power ; but the story was not well managed in 
the details. I forget the title of his third novel ; but I 
clearly remember that it opened with a description of a 
wretched room, similar to some that are presented in his 
poetry, and that on my mother's telling him frankly 
that she thought the effect very inferior to that of the 
corresponding pieces in verse, he paused in his reading, 
and after some reflection, said, ^ Your remark is just.' " 
Mrs. Crabbe's remark was probably very just. Al- 
though her husband had many qualifications for writ- 
ing prose fiction — insight into and appreciation of char- 
acter, combined with much tragic force and a real gift 
for description — there is reason to think that he would 
have been stilted and artificial in dialogue, and alto- 
gether wanting in lightness of hand. Crabbe acquiesced 
in his wife's decision, and the novels were cremated 
without a murmur. A somewhat similar fate attended 
a set of Tales in Verse which, in the year 1799, Crabbe 
was about to offer to Mr. Hatchard, the publisher, 
when he wisely took the opinion of his rector at 
Sweffling, then resident at Yarmouth, the Eev. Richard 
Turner.^ This gentleman, whose opinion Crabbe greatly 
valued, advised rei?is/o>i, and Crabbe accepted the verdict 
as the reverse of encouraging. The Tales were never 

1 Richard Turner of Yarmouth was a man of considerable 
culture, and belonged to a family of scholars. His eldest 
brother was Master of Pembroke, Cambridge, and Dean of 
Korwieh ; his youngest son was Sir Charles Turner, a Lord 
Justice of Appeal ; and Dawson Turner was his nephew. Rich- 
ard Turner was the intimate friend of Dr. Parr, Paley, and 
Canning. 



v.] IN SUFFOLK AGAIN 77 

published, and Crabbe again deferred his reappear- 
ance in print for a period of eight years. Meantime 
he applied himself to the leisurely composition of The 
Parish Register, which extended, together with that of 
some shorter poems, over the period just named. 

In the last years of the eighteenth century there was 
a sudden awakening among the bishops to the growing 
abuse of non-residence and pluralities on the part of 
the clergy. One prelate of distinction devoted his 
triennial charge to the subject, and a general " stiffen- 
ing" of episcopal good nature set in all round. The 
Bishop of Lincoln addressed Crabbe, with others of 
his delinquent clergy, and intimated to him very dis- 
tinctly the duty of returning to those few sheep in 
the wilderness at Muston and Allington. Crabbe, 
in much distress, applied to his friend Dudley North 
to use influence on his behalf to obtain extension of 
leave. But the bishop, Dr. Pretyman (Pitt's tutor 
and friend — better known by the name he afterwards 
adopted of Tomline) would not yield, and it was prob- 
ably owing to pressure from some different quarter 
that Crabbe succeeded in obtaining leave of absence 
for four years longer. Dudley North would fain have 
solved the problem by giving Crabbe one or more of 
the livings in his own gift in Suffolk, but none of 
adequate value was vacant at the time. Meanwhile, 
the house rented by Crabbe, Great Glemham Hall, was 
sold over Crabbe's head, by family arrangements in the 
North family, and he made his last move while in 
Suffolk, by taking a house in the neighbouring village 
of Eendham, where he remained during his last four 
years. Crabbe was looking forward to his elder son's 
going up to Cambridge in 1803, and this formed an 



78 CRABBE [chap. 

additional reason for wishing to remain as long as 
might be in the eastern counties. 

The writing of poetry seems to have gone on apace. 
The Parish Register was all but completed while at 
Eendham, and The Borough was also begun. After 
so long an abstinence from the glory of print, Crabbe 
at last found the required stimulus to ambition in the 
need of some further income for his two sons' educa- 
tion. But during the last winter of his residence at 
Eendham (1804-1805), Crabbe produced a poem, in 
stanzas, of very different character and calibre from 
anything he had yet written, and as to the origin of 
which one must go back to some previous incidents 
in Crabbe's history. His son is always lax as to dates, 
and often just at those periods when they would be 
the most welcome. It may be inferred, however, that 
at some date between 1790 and 1792 Crabbe suffered 
from serious derangements of his digestion, attended 
by sudden and acute attacks of vertigo. The passage 
in the memoir as to the exact period is more than 
usually vague. The writer is dealing with the year 
1800, and he proceeds : — 

"My father, now about his forty-sixth year, was much 
more stout and healthy than when I first remember him. 
Soon after that early period he became subject to vertigoes, 
which he thought indicative of a tendency to apoplexy ; and 
was occasionally bled rather profusely, which only increased 
the symptoms. When he preached his first sermon at Muston 
in the year 1789 my mother foreboded, as she afterwards told 
us, that he would preach very few more: but it was on one 
of his early journeys into Suffolk, in passing through Ipswich, 
that he had the most alarming attack." 

This account of matters is rather mixed. The ^^ early 
period " pointed to by young Crabbe is that at which 



v.] IN SUFFOLK AGAIN 79 

he himself first had distinct recollection of his father, 
and his doings. Putting that age at six years old, 
the year would be 1791 ; and it may be inferred that 
as the whole family paid a visit of many months 
to Suffolk in the year 1790, it was during that visit 
that he had the decisive attack in the streets of 
Ipswich. The account may be continued in the son's 
own words : — 

" Having left my mother at the inn, he walked into the 
town alone, and suddenly staggered in the street, and fell. 
He was lifted up by the passengers ' ' (probably from the stage- 
coach from which they had just alighted), "and overheard 
some one say significantly, ' Let the gentleman alone, he will 
be better by and by ' ; for his fall was attributed to the 
bottle. He was assisted to his room, and the late Dr. Clubbe 
was sent for, who, after a little examination, saw through the 
case with great judgment. ' There is nothing the matter with 
your head,' he observed, * nor any apoplectic tendency ; let 
the digestive organs bear the whole blame : you must take 
opiates.' From that time his health began to amend rapidly, 
and his constitution was renovated ; a rare effect of opium, 
for that drug almost always inflicts some partial injury, even 
when it is necessary; but to him it was only salutary — and 
to a constant but slightly increasing dose of it may be at- 
tributed his long and generally healthy life." 

The son makes no reference to any possible effects 
of this "slightly increasing dose" upon his father's 
intellect or imagination. • And the ordinary reader 
who knows the poet mainly through his sober couplets 
may well be surprised to hear that their author was 
ever addicted to the opium-habit; still more, that 
his imagination ever owed anything to its stimulus. 
But in ritzGerald's copy there is a ms. note, not 
signed "G. C," and therefore FitzGerald's own. It 



80 CRABBE [chap. 

runs thus : " It " (the opium) " probably influenced his 
dreams, for better or worse.'^ To this FitzGerald sig- 
nificantly addsj " see also the World of Dreams^ and 
Sir Eustace Grey.^^ 

As Crabbe is practically unknown to the readers of 
the present day, Sir Eustace Grey will be hardly even 
a name to them. For it lies, with two or three other 
noticeable poems, quite out of the familiar track of his 
narrative verse. In the first place it is in stanzas, and 
what Browning would have classed as a "Dramatic 
Lyric." The subject is as follows : The scene " a Mad- 
house," and the persons a Visitor, a Physician, and a 
Patient. The visitor has been shown over the estab- 
lishment, and is on the point of departing weary and 
depressed at the sight of so much misery, when the 
physician begs him to stay as they come in sight of the 
"cell" of a specially interesting patient. Sir Eustace 
Grey, late of Greyling Hall. Sir Eustace greets them 
as they approach, plunges at once into monologue, 
and relates (with occasional warnings from the doctor 
against over-excitement) the sad story of his mis- 
fortunes and consequent loss of reason. He begins 
with a description of his happier days : — 

" Some twenty years, I think, are gone 

(Time flies, I know not how, away), 
The sun upon no happier shone 

Nor prouder man, than Eustace Grey. 
Ask where you would, and all would say, 

The man admired and praised of all, 
By rich and poor, by grave and gay. 

Was the young lord of Greyling Hall. 

" Yes ! I had youth and rosy health. 
Was nobly formed, as man might be 



v.] IN SUFFOLK AGAIN 81 

For sickness, then, of all my wealth, 

I never gave a single fee : 
The ladies fair, the maidens free, 

Were all accustomed then to say, 
Who would a handsome figure see, 

Should look upon Sir Eustace Grey. 

" My lady ! — She was all we love ; 

All praise, to speak her worth, is faint ; 
Her manners show'd the yielding dove, 

Her morals, the seraphic saint : 
She never breathed nor looked complaint ; 

No equal upon earth had she : 
Now, what is this fair thing I paint ? 

Alas ! as all that live shall be. 

"There were two cherab-things beside, 

A gracious girl, a glorious boy ; 
Yet more to swell my full-blown pride, 

To varnish higher my fading joy, 
Pleasures were ours without alloy. 

Nay, Paradise, — till my frail Eve 
Our bliss was tempted to destroy — 

Deceived, and fated to deceive. 

"But I deserved ; — for all that time 

When I was loved, admired, caressed. 
There was within each secret crime, 

Unfelt, uncancelled, unconfessed : 
I never then my God addressed, 

In grateful praise or humble prayer ; 
And if His Word was not my jest — 

(Dread thought ! ) it never was my care." 

The misfortunes of the unhappy man proceed apace, 
and blow follows blow. He is unthankful for his 
blessings, and Heaven's vengeance descends on him. 
His wife proves faithless, and he kills her betrayer, 



82 CRABBE [chap. 

once his trusted friend. The wretched woman pines 
and dies, and the two children take some infectious 
disease and quickly follow. The sufferer turns to his 
wealth and his ambitions to drug his memory. But 
" walking in pride/' he is to be still further " abased." 
The " Watcher and the Holy One " that visited Nebu- 
chadnezzar come to Sir Eustace in vision and pro- 
nounce his fate : — 

"Full be his cup, with evil fraught — 

Demons his guides, and death his doom." 

Two fiends of darkness are told off to tempt him. 
One, presumably the Spirit of Gambling, robs him of 
his wealth, while the Spirit of Mania takes from him 
his reason, and drags him through a hell of horriblest 
imaginings. And it is at this point that what has 
been called the " dream-scenery '^ of the opium-eater 
is reproduced in a series of very remarkable stanzas : — 

" Upon that boundless plain, below. 

The setting sun's last rays were shed, 
And gave a mild and sober glow, 

Where all were still, asleep, or dead ; 
Vast ruins in the midst were spread, 

Pillars and pediments sublime, 
Where the grey moss had form'd a bed, 

And clothed the crumbling spoils of time. 

" There was I fix'd, I know not how, 

Condemn'd for untold years to stay : 
Yet years were not ; — one dreadful Now 

Endured no change of night or day ; 
The same mild evening's sleepy ray 

Shone softly-solemn and serene. 
And all that time I gazed away, 

The setting sun's sad rays were seen. 



v.] IN SUFFOLK AGAIN 83 

"At length a moment's sleep stole on, — 

Again came my commission'd foes ; 
Again through sea and land we're gone, 

No peace, no respite, no repose : 
Above the dark broad sea we rose, 

We ran through bleak and frozen land ; 
I had no strength their strength t' oppose, 

An infant in a giant's hand. 

*' They placed me where those streamers play, 

Those nimble beams of brilliant light ; 
It would the stoutest heart dismay. 

To see, to feel, that dreadful sight : 
So swift, so pure, so cold, so bright. 

They pierced my frame with icy wound ; 
And all that half-year's polar night. 

Those dancing streamers wrapp'd me round. 

" Slowly that darkness pass'd away, 

When down upon the earth I fell, — 
Some hurried sleep was mine by day ; 

But, soon as toU'd the evening bell. 
They forced me on, where ever dwell 

Far-distant men in cities fair, 
Cities of whom no travellers tell. 

Nor feet but mine were wanderers there. 

"Their watchmen stare, and stand aghast. 

As on we hurry through the dark ; 
The watch-light blinks as we go past. 

The watch-dog shrinks and fears to bark ; 
The watch-tower's, bell sounds shrill ; and, hark ! 

The free wind blows — we've left the town — 
A wide sepulchral ground I mark. 

And on a tombstone place me down. 

" "What monuments of mighty dead ! 

What tombs of various kind are found ! 
And stones erect their shadows shed 
On humble graves, with wickers bound ; 



84 CRABBE [chap. 

Some risen fresh, above the ground, 

Some level with the native clay : 
What sleeping millions wait the sound, 

' Arise, ye dead, and come away ! ' 

" Alas ! they stay not for that call ; 

Spare me this woe ! ye demons, spare ! — 
They come ! the shrouded shadows all, — 

'Tis more than mortal brain can bear ; 
Rustling they rise, they sternly glare 

At man upheld by vital breath ; 
Who, led by wicked fiends, should dare 

To join the shadowy troops of death ! " 

For about fifteen stanzas this power of wild imagin- 
ings is sustained, and, it must be admitted, at a high 
level as regards diction. The reader will note first 
how the impetuous flow of these visionary rec- 
ollections generates a style in the main so lofty 
and so strong. The poetic diction of the eighteenth 
century, against which Wordsworth made his famous 
protest, is entirely absent. Then again, the eight- 
line stanza is something quite different from a mere 
aggregate of quatrains arranged in pairs. The lines 
are knit together, sonnet-fashion, by the device 
of interlacing the rhymes, the second, fourth, fifth, 
and seventh lines rhyming. And it is singularly 
effective for its purpose, that of avoiding the sug- 
gestion of a mere ballad-measure, and carrying on 
the descriptive action with as little interruption as 
might be. 

The similarity of the illusions, here attributed to 
insanity, to those described by De Quincey as the 
result of opium, is too marked to be accidental. In 
the concluding pages of his Confessions, De Quincey 
writes : " The sense of space, and in the end the sense 



v.] IN SUFFOLK AGAIN 85 

of time, were both powerfully affected. Buildings, 
landscapes, etc., were exhibited in proportions so vast 
as the bodily eye is not fitted to receive. . . . This 
disturbed me very much less than the vast expansion 
of time. Sometimes I seemed to have lived for seventy 
or a hundred years in one night." 
Compare Crabbe's sufferer : — 

" There was I fix'd, I know not how, 
Condenin'cl for untold years to stay : 
Yet years were not ; — one dreadful Now 
Endured no change of night or day." 

Again, the rapid transition from one distant land to 
another, from the Pole to the Tropics, is common to 
both experiences. The " ill-favoured ones " who are 
charged with Sir Eustace's expiation fix him at one 
moment 

" — on the trembling ball 
That crowns the steeple's quiv'ring spire" 

just as the Opium-Fiend fixes De Quincey for centuries 
at the summit of Pagodas. Sir Eustace is accused of 
sins he had never committed : — 

" Harmless I was : yet hunted down 
For treasons to my soul unfit ; 
I've been pursued through many a town 
For crimes that petty knaves commit." 

Even so the opium-eater imagines himself flying 
from the wrath of Oriental Deities. " I came suddenly 
upon Isis and Osiris : I had done a deed, they said, which 
the Ibis and the Crocodile trembled at." The morbid 
inspiration is clearly the same in both cases, and there 
can be little doubt that Crabbe's poem owes its incep- 
tion to opium, and that the framework was devised by 
him for the utilisation of his dreams. 



86 CRABBE [chap. 

But a curious and unexpected denouement awaits 
the reader. When Sir Eustace's condition, as he de- 
scribes it, seems most hopeless, its alleviation arrives 
through a religious conversion. There has been 
throughout present to him the conscience of "a soul 
defiled with every stain." And at the same moment, 
under circumstances unexplained, his spiritual ear is 
purged to hear a " Heavenly Teacher." The voice takes 
the form of the touching and effective hymn, which 
has doubtless found a place since in many an evangel- 
ical hymn-book, beginning : — 

" Pilgrim, burthen'd with thy sin, 
Come the way to Zion's gate ; 
There, till Mercy let thee in. 
Knock and weep, and watch and wait. 
Knock ! — He knows the sinner's cry : 
Weep ! — He loves the mourner's tears : 
Watch 1 — for saving grace is nigh : 
Wait, — till heavenly light appears." 

And the hymn is followed by the pathetic confes- 
sion on the sufferer's part that this blessed experience, 
though it has brought him the assurance of heavenly 
forgiveness, still leaves him, '^though elect," looking 
sadly back on his old prosperity, and bearing, but un- 
resigned, the prospect of an old age spent amid his 
present gloomy surroundings. And yet Crabbe, with 
a touch of real imaginative insight, represents him in 
his final utterance as relapsing into a vague hope of 
some day being restored to his old prosperity : — 

*' Must you, my friends, no longer stay ? 
Thus quickly all my pleasures end ; 
But I'll remember, when I pray, 
My kind physician and his friend : 



v.] IN SUFFOLK AGAIN 87 

And those sad hours you deign to spend 

With me, I shall requite them all : 
Sir Eustace for his friends shall send, 

And thank their love at Grey ling Hall." i 

The kind physician and his friend then proceed to 
diagnose the patient's condition — which they agree is 
that of '' a frenzied child of grace," and so the poem 
ends. To one of its last stanzas Crabbe attached an 
apologetic note, one of the most remarkable ever 
penned. It exhibits the struggle that at that period 
must have been proceeding in many a thoughtful breast 
as to how the new wine of religion could be somehow 
accommodated to the old bottles : — 

" It has been suggested to me that this change from restless- 
ness to repose in the mind of Sir Eustace is wrought by a 
methodistic call ; and it is admitted to be such : a sober and 
rational conversion could not have happened while the disorder 
of the brain continued; yet the verses which follow, in a 
different measure " (Crabbe refers to the hymn), " are not in- 
tended to make any religious persuasion appear ridiculous ; 
they are to be supposed as the effect of memory in the dis- 
ordered mind of the speaker, and though evidently enthusiastic 
in respect to language, are not meant to convey any impropriety 
of sentiment." 

The implied suggestion (for it comes to this) that 
the sentiments of this devotional hymn, written by 
Crabbe himself, could only have brought comfort to 
the soul of a lunatic, is surely as good a proof as the 

1 Readers of Lockhart's Biography will remember that in one 
of Scott's latest letters to his son-in-law, before he left Eugland 
for Naples, he quoted and applied to himself this stanza of 
Sir Eustace Greij. The incident is the more pathetic that Scott, as 
he wrote the words, was quite aware that his own mind was 
failing. 



88 CRABBE [chap. 

period could produce of the bewilderment in the 
Anglican mind caused by the revival of personal 
religion under Wesley and his followers. 

According to Crabbe's son Sir Eustace Grey was 
written at Muston in the winter of 1804-1805. This is 
scarcely possible, for Crabbe did not return to his 
Leicestershire living until the autumn of the latter 
year. Probably the poem was begun in Suffolk, and the 
final touches were added later. Crabbe seems to have 
told his family that it was written during a severe 
snow-storm, and at one sitting. As the poem consists 
of fifty-five eight-lined stanzas, of somewhat complex 
construction, the accuracy of Crabbe's account is 
doubtful. If its inspiration was in some degree due 
to opium, we know from the example of S. T. Coleridge 
that the opium-habit is not favourable to certainty of 
memory or the accurate presentation of facts. After 
Crabbe's death, there was found in one of his many 
manuscript note-books a copy of verses, undated, 
entitled The World of Dreams, which his son printed 
in subsequent editions of the poems. The verses are 
in the same metre and rhyme-system as Sir JEustace, 
and treat of precisely the same class of visions as re- 
corded by the inmate of the asylum. The rapid and 
continuous transition from scene to scene, and period 
to period, is the same in both. Foreign kings and 
other potentates reappear, as with De Quincey, in 
ghostly and repellent forms : — 



' I know not how, but I am brought 
Into a large and Gothic hall, 

Seated with those I never sought — 
Kings, Caliphs, Kaisers — silent all ; 



v.] IN SUFFOLK AGAIN 89 

Pale as the dead ; enrobed and tall, 

Majestic, frozen, solemn, still ; 
They make my fears, my wits appal. 

And with both scorn and terror fill." 

This, again, may be compared, or rather contrasted, 
with Coleridge's Pains of Sleep, and it can hardly be 
doubted that the two poems had a common origin. 

The year 1805 was the last of Crabbe's sojourn in 
Suffolk, and it was made memorable in the annals of 
literature by the appearance of the Lciy of the Last 
Minstrel. Crabbe first met with it in a bookseller's 
shop in Ipswich, read it nearly through while stand- 
ing at the counter, and pronounced that a new and 
great poet had appeared. 

This was Crabbe's first introduction to one who was 
before long to prove himself one of his warmest ad- 
mirers and friends. It was one of Crabbe's virtues 
that he was quick to recognise the worth of his poeti- 
cal contemporaries. He had been repelled, with many 
others, by the weak side of the Lyrical Ballads, but he 
lived to revere Wordsworth's genius. His admiration 
for Burns was unstinted. But amid all the signs of a 
poetical renaissance in progress, and under a natural 
temptation to tread the fresh woods and pastures new 
that were opening before him, it showed a true judg- 
ment in Crabbe that he never faltered in the con- 
viction that his own opportunity and his own strength 
lay elsewhere. Not in the romantic or the mystical — 
not in perfection of form or melody of lyric verse, 
were his own humbler triumphs to be won. Like 
Wordsworth, he was to find a sufficiency in the 
" common growth of mother-earth," though indeed less 
in her " mirth " than in her " tears." Notwithstanding 



90 CRABBE [chap, v.] 

his Eustace Grey, and World of Dreams, and the really 
powerful story of Aaron the Gipsy (afterwards to ap- 
pear as The Hall of Justice), Crabbe was returning to 
the themes and the methods of Tlie Village. He had 
already completed The Parish Eegister, and had The 
Borough in contemplation, when he returned to his 
Leicestershire parish. The woods of Belvoir, and 
the rural charms of Parham and Glemham, had not 
dimmed the memory of the sordid little fishing-town, 
where the spirit of poetry had first met him, and 
thrown her mantle round him. 

And now the day had come when the mandate of 
the bishop could no longer be ignored. In October 
1805, Crabbe with his wife and two sons returned to 
the Parsonage at Muston. He had been absent from 
his joint livings about thirteen years, of which four 
had been spent at Parham, five at Great Glemham, 
and four at Eendham, all three places lying within 
a small area, and within reach of the same old friends 
and relations. No wonder that he left the neighbour- 
hood with a reluctance that was probably too well 
guessed by his parishioners in the Vale of Belvoir. 



CHAPTER VI 

THE PARISH REGISTER 
(1805-1809) 

"When in October 1805, Mr. Crabbe resumed the 
charge of his own parish of Muston, he found some 
changes to vex him, and not the less because he had 
too much reason to suspect that his long absence from 
his incumbency had been, partly at least, the cause of 
them. His cure had been served by respectable and 
diligent clergymen, but they had been often changed, 
and some of them had never resided within the parish ; 
and he felt that the binding influence of a settled and 
permanent minister had not been withdrawn for twelve 
years with impunity. A Wesleyan missionary had 
formed a thriving establishment in Muston, and the 
congregations at the parish church were no longer 
such as they had been of old. This much annoyed my 
father ; and the warmth with whichhe began to preach 
against dissent only irritated himself and others, with- 
out bringing back disciples to the fold." 

So writes Crabbe's son with his wonted frankness 
and good judgment. Moreover, besides the Wesleyan 
secession, the mischievous extravagances of William 
Huntington (S.S.) had found their way into the 
parish. To make matters w^orse, a former gardener of 
Crabbe's had set up as a preacher of the doctrines of 

91 



92 CRABBE [chap. 

this fanatic, who was still attracting crowds in London. 
Then, too, as another fruit of the rector's long absence, 
strange stories of his political opinions had become 
current. Owing, doubtless, to his renewed acquaint- 
ance with Dudley North at Glemham, and occasional 
associations with the Whig leaders at his house, he 
had exposed himself to the terrible charge that he was 
a Jacobin ! 

Altogether Crabbe's clerical position in Leicester- 
shire, during the next nine years, could not have been 
very comfortable. But he was evidently still, as al- 
ways, the devout and kindly pastor of his flock, and 
happily for himself, he was now to receive new and 
unexpected tributes to his popularity in other fields. 
His younger son, John, now eighteen years of age, Avas 
shortly to go up to Cambridge, and this fresh expense 
had to be provided for. To this end, a volume of 
poems, partly old and partly new, had been for some 
time in preparation, and in September 1807, it ap- 
peared from the publishing house of John Hatchard in 
Piccadilly. In it were included Tlie Library, The Neios- 
paper, and The Village. The principal new poem was 
The Parish Register, to Avhich were added Sir Eustace 
Grey and The Hall of Justice. The volume was pref- 
aced by a Dedication to Henry Eichard Fox, third 
Lord Holland, nephew and sometime ward of Charles 
James Fox, and the reason for such dedication is told 
at greater length in the long autobiographical intro- 
duction that follows. 

Twenty-two years had clasped since Crabbe's last 
appearance as an author, and he seems to have thought 
it due to his readers to give some reason for his long 
abstention from the poet's " idle trade." He pleads a 



VI.] THE PABISH BEGISTEE 93 

higher " calling," that of his professional duties, as 
sufficient excuse. MoreoA^er, he offers the same excuse 
for his '^ progress in the art of versification '- being less 
marked than his readers might otherwise expect. He 
then proceeds to tell the story of the kindness he had 
received from Burke (who had died in 1797); the 
introduction by him to Sir Joshua Eeynolds, and 
through him again to Samuel Johnson. He gives in 
full Johnson's note approving The Village, and after a 
further laborious apology for the shortcomings of his 
present literary venture, goes on to tell the one really 
relevant incident of its appearance. Crabbe had de- 
termined, he says, now that his old valued advisers 
had passed away, not to publish anything more — 

"unless I could first obtain the sanction of such an opinion 
as I might with some confidence rely upon. I looked for a 
friend who, having the discerning taste of Mr. Burke and the 
critical sagacity of Doctor Johnson, would bestow upon my 
MS. the attention requisite to form his opinion, and would 
then favour me with the result of his observations ; and it 
was my singular good fortune to obtain such assistance — the 
opinion of a critic so qualified, and a friend so disposed to 
favour me. I had been honoured by an introduction to the 
Right Hon. Charles James Fox, some years before, at the 
seat of Mr. Burke ; and being again with him, I received a 
promise that he would peruse any work I might send to him 
previous to its publication, and would give me his opinion. 
At that time I did not think myself sufficiently prepared ; 
and when afterwards I had collected some poems for his in- 
spection, I found my right honourable friend engaged by the 
affairs of a great empire, and struggling with the inveteracy 
of a fatal disease. At such time, upon such mind, ever dis- 
posed to oblige as that mind was, I could not obtrude the 
petty business of criticising verses ; but he remembered the 
promise he had kindly given, and repeated an offer which 



94 CRABBE [chap. 

though I had not presumed to expect, I was happy to receive. 
A copy of the poems, now first published, was sent to him, 
and (as I have the information from Lord Holland, and his 
Lordship's permission to inform my readers) the poem which 
I have named The Parish Register was heard by Mr. Fox, 
and it excited interest enough by some of its parts to gain fur 
me the benefit of his judgment upon the whole. Whatever he 
approved, the reader will readily believe, I have carefully 
retained : the parts he disliked are totally expunged, and 
others are substituted, which I hope resemble those more 
conformable to the taste of so admirable a judge. Nor can I 
deny myself the melancholy satisfaction of adding that this 
poem (and more especially the history of Phoebe Dawson, 
with some parts of the second book) were the last composi- 
tions of their kind that engaged and amused the capacious, the 
candid, the benevolent mind of this great man." 



It was, as we have seen, at Dudley North's residence 
in Suffolk that Crabbe had renewed his acquaintance 
with Fox, and received from him fresh offers of criticism 
and advice. And now the great statesman had passed 
beyond reach of Crabbe's gratitude. He had died in 
the autumn of 1806, at the Duke of Devonshire's, at 
Chiswick. His last months were of great suffering, 
and the tedium of his latter days was relieved by being 
read aloud to — the Latin poets taking their turn with 
Crabbe's pathetic stories of humble life. In the same 
preface, Crabbe further expresses similar obligations 
to his friend, Richard Turner of Yarmouth. The 
result of this double criticism is the more discernible 
when we compare IVie Parish Register with its suc- 
cessor, The Borough, in the composition of which Crabbe 
admits, in the preface to that poem, that he had trusted 
more entirely to his own judgment. 

In TJie Parish Register, Crabbe returns to the theme 



VI.] THE PABISH BEGISTEB 95 

which, he had treated twenty years before in The 
Village, but on a larger and more elaborate scale. 
The scheme is simple and not ineffective. A village 
clergyman is the narrator, and with his registers of 
baptisms, marriages, and burials open before him, looks 
through the various entries for the year just com- 
pleted. As name after name recalls interesting par- 
ticulars of character and incident in their history, he 
relates them as if to an imaginary friend at his side. 
The precedent of The Deserted Village is still obviously 
near to the writer's mind, and he is alternately at- 
tracted and repelled by Goldsmith's ideals. For 
instance, the poem opens with an introduction of some 
length in which the general aspects of village life are 
described. Crabbe begins by repudiating any idea of 
such life as had been described by his predecessor : — 

" Is there a place, save one the poet sees, 
A land of love, of liberty, and ease ; 
Where labour wearies not, nor cares suppress 
Th' eternal flow of rustic happiness : 
Where no proud mansion frowns in awful state, 
Or keeps the sunshine from the cottage-gate ; 
Where young and old, intent on pleasure, throng, 
And half man's life is holiday and song ? 
Vain search for scenes like these ! no view appears. 
By sighs unrufifled, or unstain'd by tears ; 
Since vice the world subdued and waters drown'd, 
Auburn and Eden can "no more be found." 

And yet the poet at once proceeds to describe his 
village in much the same tone, and with much of the 
same detail as Goldsmith had done : — 

"Behold the Cot ! where thrives th' industrious swain, 
Source of his pride, his pleasure, and his gain, 



96 CRABBE [chap. 

Screen' d from the winter's wind, the sun's last ray 

Smiles on the window and prolongs the day ; 

Projecting thatch the woodbine's branches stop, 

And turn their blossoms to the casement's top ; 

All need requires is in that cot contain'd, 

And much that taste untaught and unrestrain'd 

Surveys delighted : there she loves to trace. 

In one gay picture, all the royal race ; 

Around the walls are heroes, lovers, kings ; 

The print that shows them and the verse that sings." 

Then follow, as in Tlie Deserted Village, the coloured 
prints, and ballads, and even The Twelve Good Rides, 
that decorate the walls: the humble library that fills 
the deal shelf " beside the cnckoo clock " ; the few 
devotional works, including the illustrated Bible, 
bought in jjarts with the weekly sixpence ; the choice 
notes by learned editors that raise more doubts than 
they close. " Eather," exclaims Crabbe : — 

" Oh ! rather give me commentators plain 
Who with no deep researches vex the brain ; 
Who from the dark and doubtful love to run. 
And hold their glimmering tapers to the sun." 

The last line of which he conveyed, no doubt uncon- 
sciously, from Young. Nothing can be more winning 
than the picture of the village home thus presented. 
And outside it, the plot of carefully-tended ground, 
with not only fruits and herbs but space reserved for a 
few choice flowers, the rich carnation and the " pounced 
auricula" : — 

" Here, on a Sunday eve, when service ends. 
Meet and rejoice a family of friends : 
All speak aloud, are happy and are free, 
And glad they seem, and gaily they agree. 
AVhat, though fastidious ears may shun the speech, 
Where all are talkers, and where none can teach : 



viO THE PABISH BEGISTEB 97 

Where still the welcome and the words are old, 
And the same stories are for ever told ; 
Yet theirs is joy that, bursting from the heart, 
Prompts the glad tongue these nothings to impart ; 
That forms these tones of gladness we despise, 
That lifts their steps, that sparkles in their eyes ; 
That talks or laughs or runs or shouts or plays, 
And speaks in all their looks and all their ways." 

This charming passage is thoroughly in Goldsmith's 
vein, and even shows markedly the influence of his 
manner, and yet it is no mere echo of another poet. 
The scenes described are those which had become dear 
and familiar to Crabbe during years of residence in 
Leicestershire and inland Suffolk. And yet at this 
very juncture, Crabbe's poetic conscience smites him. 
It is not for him, he remembers, to deal only with the 
sweeter aspects, though he knows them to exist, of 
village life. He must return to its sterner side : — 

" Fair scenes of peace ! ye might detain us long. 
But vice and misery now demand the song ; 
And turn our view from dwellings simply neat, 
To this infected Row we term our Street." 

For even the village of trim gardens and cherished 
Bibles has its " slums," and on these slums Crabbe pro- 
ceeds to enlarge with almost ferocious realism : — 

" Here, in cabal, a disputatious crew 
Each evening meet ; the sot, the cheat, the shrew ; 
Riots are nightly heard : — the curse, the cries 
Of beaten wife, perverse in her replies. 
While shrieking children hold each threat'ning hand. 
And sometimes life, and sometimes food demand ; 
Boys, in their first-stoPn rags, to swear begin ; 
And girls, who heed not dress, are skill' d in gin." 

H 



98 CRABBE [chap. 

It is obvious, I tliinkj that Crabbe's representations 
of country life here, as in The Village and The Borough, 
are often eclectic, and that for the sake of telling con- 
trast, he was at times content to blend scenes that he 
had witnessed under very opposite conditions. 

The section entitled " Baptisms '^ deals accordingly 
with many sad instances of " base-born " children, and the 
section on "Marriages " also has its full share of kindred 
instances in which the union in Church has only been 
brought about by pressure from the parish authorities. 
The marriage of one such " compelled bridegroom " is 
related with a force and minuteness of detail through- 
out which not a word is thrown away : — 

" Next at our altar stood a luckless pair, 
Brought by strong passions and a warrant there ; 
By long rent cloak, hung loosely, strove the bride 
From every eye, what all perceived, to hide. 
"While the boy-bridegroom, shuffling in his pace, 
Now hid awhile, and then exposed his face ; 
As shame alternately with anger strove 
The brain, confused with muddy ale, to move, 
In haste and stammering he perform' d his part, 
And look'd the rage that rankled in his heart : 
(So will each lover inly curse his fate. 
Too soon made happy, and made wise too late :) 
I saw his features take a savage gloom, 
And deeply threaten for the days to come. 
Low spake the lass, and lisp'd and minced the while, 
Look'd on the lad, and faintly tried to smile ; 
With soften'd speech and humbled tone she strove 
To stir the embers of departed love : 
While he, a tyrant, frowning walk'd before, 
Felt the poor purse, and sought the public door, 
She sadly following in submission went 
And saw the final shilling foully spent ; 



VI.] THE PABISH REGISTER 99 

Then to her father's hut the pair withdrew, 
And bade to love and comfort long adieu ! 

Ah ! fly temptation, youth, refrain ! refrain ! 

I preach for ever ; but I preach in vain ! ' ' 

There is no " mealy-moutlied philanthropy" here. 
No one can doubt the earnestness and truth of the 
poet's mingled anger and sorrow. The misery of 
irregular unions had never been " bitten in " with more 
convincing force. The verse, moreover, in the passage 
is freer than usual from many of Crabbe's eccen- 
tricities. It is marked here and there by his fondness 
for verbal antithesis, almost amounting to the pun, 
which his parodists have not overlooked. The second 
line indeed is hardly more allowable in serious verse 
than Dickens's mention of the lady who went home " in 
a flood of tears and a sedan-chair." But Crabbe's indul- 
gence in this habit is never a mere concession to the 
reader's flippant taste. His epigrams often strike 
deeply home, as in this instance or in the line : — 

" Too soon made happy, and made wise too late." 

The story that follows of Phoebe Dawson, which 
helped to soothe Fox in the last stage of his long dis- 
ease, is no less powerful. The gradual steps by which 
the village beauty is led to her ruin are told in a hun- 
dred lines with a fidelity not surpassed in the case 
of the story of Hetty Sorrel. The verse, alternately 
recalling Pope and Goldsmith, is yet impelled by a 
moral intention, which gives it absolute individuality. 
The picture presented is as poignantly pathetic as 
Frederick Walker's Lost Path, or Langhorne's " Child 
of misery, baptized in tears." That it will ever again 
be ranked with such may be doubtful, for technique is 

ILofC. 



100 CRABBE [chap. 

the first quality demanded of an artist in our day, and 
Crabbe's technique is too often defective in the extreme. 
Tliese more tragic incidents of village life are, how- 
ever, relieved at proper intervals by some of lighter 
complexion. There is the gentleman's gardener who has 
his successive children christened by the Latin names 
of his plants, — Lonicera, Hyacinthus, and Senecio. 
Then we have the gallant, gay Lothario, who not only 
fails to lead astray the lovely Fanny Price, bat is con- 
verted by her to worthier aims, and ends by becoming 
the best friend and benefactor of her and her rustic 
suitor. There is an impressive sketch of the elderly 
prude : — 

" wise, austere, and nice, 

Who showed her virtue by her scorn of vice " ; 

and another of the selfish and worldly life of the Lady 
at the Great House who prefers to spend her fortune 
in London, and leaves her tenants to the tender mercies 
of her steward. Her forsaken mansion is described in 
lines curiously anticipating Hood's Haunted House : — 

" forsaken stood the Hall : 

Worms ate the floors, the tap'stry fled the wall : 
No fire the kitchen's cheerless grate display'd ; 
No cheerful light the long-closed sash convey'd ; 
The crawling worm that turns a summer fly, 
Here spun his shroud, and laid him up to die 
The winter-death : — upon the bed of state, 
The bat shrill shrieking woo'd his flickering mate." 

In the end her splendid funeral is solemnised : — 

" Dark but not awful, dismal but yet mean. 
With anxious bustle moves the cumbrous scene ; 
Presents no objects tender or profound 



VI.] THE PABISH BEGISTEB 101 

And the sarcastic village-fatlier, after hearing 
"some scholar'^ read the list of her titles and her 
virtues, " looked disdain and said '' : — 

"Away, my friends ! why take such pains to know 
What some brave marble soon in Church shall show ? 
Where not alone her gracious name shall stand, 
But how she lived — the blessing of the land ; 
How much we all deplored the noble dead, 
What groans we uttered and what tears we shed ; 
Tears, true as those which in the sleepy eyes 
Of weeping cherubs on the stone shall rise ; 
Tears, true as those which, ere she found her grave, 
The noble Lady to our sorrows gave ! ' ' 

These portraits of the ignoble rich are balanced by 
one of the " noble peasant '^ Isaac Ashford, drawn, as 
Crabbe's son tells us, from a former parish-clerk of his 
father's at North Glemham. Coming to be past work 
through infirmities of age, the old man has to face the 
probability of the parish poorhouse, and reconciling 
himself to his lot is happily spared the sore trial : — 

"Daily he placed the Workhouse in his view ! 
But came not there, for sudden was his fate. 
He dropp'd, expiring, at his cottage-gate. 

I feel his absence in the hours of prayer, 
And view his seat, and sigh for Isaac there : 
I see no more those white locks thinly spread 
Round the bald polish of that honour' d head ; 
No more that awful glance on playful wight, 
Compell'd to kneel and tremble at the sight, 
To fold his fingers, all in dread the while, 
Till Mister Ashford soften 'd to a smile ; 
No more that meek and suppliant look in prayer, 
Nor the pure faith (to give it force), are there : — 
But he is blest, and I lament no more 
A wise, good man, contented to be poor." 



102 CRABBE [chap. 

Where Crabbe is represented, not unfairly, as dwell- 
ing mainly on the seamy side of peasant and village 
life, such passages as the above are not to be over- 
looked. 

This final section ("Burials") is brought to a 
close by an ingenious incident which changes the cur- 
rent of the vicar's thoughts. He is in the midst of the 
recollections of his departed flock when the tones of 
the passing-bell fall upon his ear. On sending to in- 
quire he finds that they tell of a new death, that of 
his own aged parish-sexton, " old Dibble " (the name, 
it may be presumed, an imperfect reminiscence of Jus- 
tice Shallow's friend). The speaker's thoughts are now 
directed to his old parish servant, and to the old man's 
favourite stories of previous vicars under whom he has 
served. Thus the poem ends with sketches of Parson 
Addle, Parson Peele, Dr. Grandspear and others — 
among them the "Author-Kector," intended (the 
younger Crabbe thought) as a portrait of the poet him- 
self. Finally Crabbe could not resist the temptation 
to include a young parson, " a youth from Cambridge," 
who has imbibed some extreme notions of the school 
of Simeon, and who is shown as fearful on his death- 
bed lest he should have been guilty of too many good 
works. He appeals to his old clerk on the subject : — ■ 

" 'My alms-deeds all, and every deed I've done, 
' My moral-rags defile me every one ; 

♦ It should not be : — what say'st thou ! Tell me, Ralph.' 
' Quoth I, your Reverence, I believe you're safe ; 

' Your faith's your prop, nor have you pass'd such time 

* In life's good works as swell them to a crime. 
' If I of pardon for my sins were sure, 

' About my goodness I would rest secure.' " 



VI.] THE PABISII BEGISTEB 103 

The volume containing The Parish Register, The 
Village, and others, appeared in the autumn of 1807 ; 
and Crabbe's general acceptance as a poet of mark 
dates from that year. Four editions were issued by 
Mr. Hatchard during the following year and a half — 
the fourth appearing in March 1809. The reviews 
were unanimous in approval, headed by Jeffrey in the 
Edinburgh, and within two days of the appearance of 
this article, according to Crabbe's son, the whole of 
the first edition was sold off. 

At this date, there was room for Crabbe as a poet, 
and there was still more room for him as an innovator 
in the art of fiction. Macaulay, in his essay on Addi- 
son, has pointed out how the Eoger de Coverley papers 
gave the public of his day the first taste of a new and 
exquisite pleasure. At the time " when Fielding was 
birds-nesting, and Smollett was unborn," he was laying 
the foundations of the English novel of real life. 
After nearly a hundred years, Crabbe was conferring 
a similar benefit. The novel had in the interim risen 
to its full height, and then sunk. When Crabbe pub- 
lished his Parish Register, the novels of the day were 
largely the vapid productions of the Minerva Press, 
without atmosphere, colour, or truth. Miss Edge worth 
alone had already struck the note of a new develop- 
ment in her Castle Rackrent, not to mention the delight- 
ful stories in TJie Parents^ Assistant, Simple Susan, 
Lazy Lawrence, or The Basket- Woman. Gait's master- 
piece, The Annals of the Parish, was not yet even lying 
unfinished in his desk. The Mucklebackits and the 
Headriggs were still further distant. Miss Mitford's 
sketches in Our Village — the nearest in form to 
Crabbe's pictures of country life — were to come later 



104 CRABBE [chap. 

still. Crabbe, tliougli he adhered, with a wise know- 
ledge of his own powers, to the heroic couplet, is really 
a chief founder of the rural novel — the Silas Marner 
and the Adam Beds of fifty years later. Of course (for 
no man is original) he had developed his methods out 
of those of his predecessors. Pope was his earliest 
master in his art. And what Pope had done in his 
telling couplets for the man and woman of fashion — 
the Chloes and Narcissas of his day — Crabbe hoped 
that he might do for the poor and squalid inhabitants 
of the Suffolk seaport. Then, too, Thomson's 'lovely 
young Lavinia," and Goldsmith's village-parson and 
poor widow gathering her cresses from the brook, had 
been before him and contributed their share of influ- 
ence. But Crabbe's achievement was practically a new 
thing. The success of The Parish Register was largely 
that of a new adventure in the world of fiction. What- 
ever defects the critic of pure poetry might discover 
in its workmanship, the poem was read for its stories — 
for a truth of realism that could not be doubted, and 
for a pity that could not be unshared. 

In 1809 Crabbe forwarded a copy of his poems (now 
reduced by the publisher to the form of two small 
volumes, and in their fourth edition) to Walter Scott, 
who acknowledged them and Crabbe's accompanying 
letter in a friendly reply, to which reference has al- 
ready been made. After mentioning how for more 
than twenty years he had desired the pleasure of a 
personal introduction to Crabbe, and how, as a lad of 
eighteen, he had met with selections from The Village 
and The Library in The Annual Register, he continues : — 

"You may therefore guess my sincere delight when I saw 
your poems at a late period assume the rank in the public 



VI.] THE PABISH BEGISTEB 105 

consideration which they so well deserve. It was a triumph 
to my own immature taste to find I had anticipated the ap- 
plause of the learned and the critical, and I became very de- 
sirous to offer my gratulor among the more important plaudits 
which you have had from every quarter. I should certainly 
have availed myself of the freemasonry of authorship (for 
our trade may claim to be a mystery as well as Abhorson's) 
to address to you a copy of a new poetical attempt, which I 
have now upon the anvil, and I esteem myself particularly 
obliged to Mr. Ilatchard, and to your goodness acting upon his 
information, for giving me the opportunity of paving the way 
for such a freedom. I am too proud of the compliments you 
honour me with to affect to dechne them; and with respect 
to the comparative view I have of my own labours and yours, 
I can only assure you that none of my little folks, about the 
formation of whose tastes and principles I may be supposed 
naturally solicitous, have ever read any of my own poems — 
while yours have been our regular evening's amusement. 
My eldest girl begins to read well, and enters as well into 
the humour as into the sentiment of your admirable descrip- 
tions of human life. As for rivalry, I think it has seldom 
existed among those who know by experience that there 
are much better things in the world than literary reputation, 
and that one of the best of these good things is the regard 
and friendship of those deservedly and generally esteemed 
for their worth or their talents. I believe many dilettante 
authors do cocker themselves up into a great jealousy of 
anything that interferes with what they are pleased to call 
their fame : but I should as soon think of nursing one of my 
own fingers into a whitlow for my private amusement as 
encouraging such a feeling. . I am truly sorry to observe 
you mention bad health : those who contribute so much to 
the improvement as well as the delight of society should es- 
cape this evil. I hope, however, that one day your state of 
health may permit you to view this country." 

This interchange of letters was the beginning of a 
friendship that was to endure and strengthen through 



106 CRABBE [chap. 

the lives of both poets, for they died in the self-same 
year. The '^ new poetical attempt '*' that was " on the 
anvil " must have been The Lady of the Lake, completed 
and published in the following year. But already Scott 
had uneasy misgivings that the style would not bear 
unlimited repetition. Even before Byron burst upon 
the world with the two first cantos of Childe Harold, 
and drew on him the eyes of all readers of poetry, 
Scott had made the unwelcome discovery that his own 
matter and manner was imitable, and that others were 
borrowing it. Many could now "grow the flower'' 
(or something like it), for " all had got the seed." 
It was this persuasion that set him thinking whether 
he might not change his topics and his metre, and 
still retain his public. To this end he threw up a 
few tiny hallons d'essai — experiments in the manner 
of some of his popular contemporaries, and printed 
them in the columns of the Edinburgh Annual Register. 
One of these was a grim story of village crime called 
The Poacher, and written in avowed imitation of 
Crabbe. Scott was earnest in assuring Lockhart that 
he had written in no spirit of travesty, but only to 
test whether he would be likely to succeed in narrative 
verse of the same pattern. He had adopted Crabbe's 
metre, and as far as he could compass it, his spirit also. 
The result is noteworthy, and shows once again how 
a really original imagination cannot pour itself into 
another's mould. A few lines may suffice, in evidence. 
The couplet about the vicar's sermons makes one sure 
that for the moment Scott was good-hum ouredly copy- 
ing one foible at least of his original : — 

" Approach and through the unlatticed window peep, 
Nay, shrink not back, the inmate is asleep ; 



VI.] THE PABISH REGISTER 107 

Sunk 'mid yon sordid blankets, till the sun 

Stoop to the west, the plunderer's toils are done. 

Loaded and primed, and prompt for desperate hand, 

Rifle and fowling-piece beside him stand, 

While round the hut are in disorder laid 

The tools and booty of his lawless trade ; 

For force or fraud, resistance or escape 

The crow, the saw, the bludgeon, and the crape ; 

His pilfered powder in yon nook he hoards, 

And the filched lead the church's roof affords — 

(Hence shall the rector's congregation fret, 

That while his sermon's dry, his walls are wet.) 

The fish'Spear barbed, the sweeping net are there, 

Dog-hides, and pheasant plumes, and skins of hare. 

Cordage for toils, and wiring for the snare. 

Bartered for game from chase or warren won, 

Yon cask holds moonlight, i seen when moon was none ; 

And late-snatched spoils lie stowed in hutch apart, 



Happily for Scott's fame, and for the world's delight, 
he did not long pursue the unprofitable task of copy- 
ing other men. Rokehy appeared, was coldly received, 
and then Scott turned his thoughts to fiction in prose, 
came upon his long-lost fragment of Waverley, and the 
need of conciliating the poetic taste of the day was at 
an end for ever. But his affection for Crabbe never 
waned. In his earlier novels there was no contem- 
porary poet he more often quoted as headings for his 
chapters — and it was Crabbe' s Borough to which he 
listened with unfailing delight twenty years later, in 
the last sad hours of his decay. 

1 A cant term for smuggled spirits. 



CHAPTER VII 

THE BOROUGH 
(1809-1812) 

The immediate success of The Parish Register in 1807 
encouraged Crabbe to proceed at once with a far longer 
poem, which had been some years in hand. The 
Borough was begun at Rendham in Suffolk in 1801, 
continued at Muston after the return thither in 1805, 
and finally completed during a long visit to Alde- 
burgh in the autumn of 1809. That the poem should 
have been '^ in the making '^ during at least eight 
years is quite what might be inferred from the 
finished work. It proved, on appearance, to be of 
portentous length — at least ten thousand lines. Its 
versification included every degree of finish of which 
Crabbe was capable, from his very best to his very 
worst. Parts of it were evidently written when the 
theme stirred and moved the writer : others, again, 
when he was merely bent on reproducing scenes that 
lived in his singularly retentive memory, with needless 
minuteness of detail, and in any kind of couplet that 
might pass muster in respect of scansion and rhyme. 
In the preface to the poem, on its appearance in 1810, 
Crabbe displays an uneasy consciousness that his poem 
was open to objection in this respect. In his previous 
ventures he had had Edmund Burke, Johnson, and 

108 



[chap. VII.] THE BOROUGH 109 

Fox, besides his friend Turner at Yarmouth, to re- 
strain or to revise. On the present occasion, the three 
first-named friends had passed away, and Crabbe took 
his MS. with him to Yarmouth, on the occasion of his 
visit to the Eastern Counties, for Mr. Richard Turner's 
opinion. The scholarly rector of Great Yarmouth may 
well have shrunk from advising on a poem of ten thou- 
sand lines in which, as the result was to show, the 
pruning-knif e and other trenchant remedies would have 
seemed to him urgently needed. As it proved, Mr. 
Turner's opinion was on the whole " highly favourable ; 
but he intimated that there were portions of the new 
work which might be liable to rough treatment from 
the critics." 

The Borough is an extension — a very elaborate ex- 
tension—of the topics already treated in Tlie Village 
and The Parish Register. The place indicated is undis- 
guisedly Aldeburgh ; but as Crabbe had now chosen 
a far larger canvas for his picture, he ventured to en- 
large the scope of his observation, and while retaining 
the scenery and general character of the little seaport 
of his youth, to introduce any incidents of town life 
and experiences of human character that he had 
met Avith subsequently. Tlie Borough is Aldeburgh 
extended and magnified. Besides church officials 
it exhibits every shade of nonconformist creed and 
practice, notably those of which the writer was now 
having unpleasant experience at Muston. It has, of 
course, like its prototype, a mayor and corporation, 
and frequent parliamentary elections. It supports 
many professors of the law; physicians of high 
repute, and medical quacks of very low. Social life 
and pleasure is abundant, with clubs, card-parties, and 



110 CRABBE [chap. 

theatres. It boasts an almshouse, hospital, prisons, 
and schools for all classes. The poem is divided into 
twenty -four cantos or sections, written as "Letters" to 
an imaginary correspondent who had bidden the writer 
" describe the borough," each dealing with its separate 
topic — professions, trades, sects in religion, inns, stroll- 
ing players, almshouse inhabitants, and so forth. 
These descriptions are relieved at intervals by elabo- 
rate sketches of character, as in The Parish Register — 
the vicar, the curate, the parish clerk, or by some 
notably pathetic incident in the life of a tenant of the 
almshouse, or a prisoner in the gaol. Some of these 
reach the highest level of Crabbe's previous studies in 
the same kind, and it was to these that the new work 
was mainly to owe its success. Despite of frequent 
defects of workmanship, they cling to the memory 
through their truth and intensity, though to many a 
reader to-day such episodes may be chiefly known to 
exist through a parenthesis in one of Macaulay's Essays, 
where he speaks of " that pathetic passage in Crabbe's 
Borough which has made many a rough and cynical 
reader cry like a child." 

The passage referred to is the once-famous descrip- 
tion of the condemned Eelon in the "Letter" on 
Prisons. Macaulay had, as we know, his " heightened 
way of putting things," but the narrative which he 
cites, as foil to one of Eobert Montgomery's borrow- 
ings, deserves the praise. It shows Crabbe's descrip- 
tive power at its best, and his rare power and 
insight into the workings of the heart and mind. He 
has to trace the sequence of thoughts and feelings in 
the condemned criminal during the days between his 
sentence and its execution; the dreams of happier 



VII.] THE BOBOUGH 111 

days that haunt his pillow — days when he wandered 
with his sweetheart or his sister through their village 
meadows : — 

" Yes ! all are with liirn now, and all the while 
Life's early prospects and his Fanny's smile : 
Then come his sister and his village friend, 
And he will now the sweetest moments spend 
Life has to yield ; — No ! never will he find 
Again on earth such pleasure in his mind : 
He goes through shrubby walks these friends among, 
Love in their looks and honour on the tongue : 
Nay, there's a charm beyond what nature shows, 
The bloom is softer and more sweetly glows ; 
Pierced by no crime and urged by no desire 
For more than true and honest hearts require. 
They feel the calm delight, and thus proceed 
Through the green lane, — then linger in the mead, — 
Stray o'er the heath in all its purple bloom, — 
And pluck the blossom where the wild bees hum ; 
Then through the broomy bound with ease they pass, 
And press the sandy sheep-walk's slender grass. 
Where dwarfish flowers among the grass are spread, 
And the lamb browses by the linnet's bed ; 
Then 'cross the bounding brook they make their way 
O'er its rough bridge — and there behold the bay ! — 
The ocean smiling to the fervid sun — 
The waves that faintly fall and slowly run — 
The ships at distance and the boats at hand ; 
And now they walk upon the sea-side sand, 
Counting the number, and what kind they be, 
Ships softly sinking in the sleepy sea : 
Now arm in arm, now parted, they behold 
The glittering waters on the shingles rolled : 
The timid girls, half dreading their design. 
Dip the small foot in the retarded brine, 
And search for crimson weeds, which spreading flow, 
Or lie like pictures on the sand below : 



112 CRABBE [chap. 

With all those bright red pebbles, that the sun, 
Through the small waves so softly shines upon ; 
And those live lucid jellies w^hich the eye 
Delights to trace as they sw^im glittering by : 
Pearl-shells and rubied star-fish they admire, 
And w^ill arrange above the parlour fire, — 
Tokens of bliss ! — 'Oh ! horrible ! a wave 
Roars as its rises — save me, Edward ! save ! ' 
She cries : — Alas ! the watchman on his way 
Calls and lets in — truth, terror, and the day ! " 

Allowing for a certain melodramatic climax here 
led up to, we cannot deny the impressiveness of this 
picture — the first-hand quality of its observation, and 
an eye for beauty, which his critics are rarely disposed 
to allow to Crabbe. A narrative of equal pathos, 
and once equally celebrated, is that of the village-girl 
who receives back her sailor-lover from his last voyage, 
only to watch over his dying hours. It is in an 
earlier section (No. ii. The Church), beginning : — 

"Yes ! there are real mourners — I have seen 
A fair sad girl, mild, suffering, and serene," 

too long to quote in full, and, as with Crabbe's method 
generally, not admitting of being fairly represented 
by extracts. Then there are sketches of character 
in quite a different vein, such as the vicar, evidently 
drawn from life. He is the good easy man, popular 
with the ladies for a kind of fade complimentary style 
in which he excels ; the man of "mild benevolence," 
strongly opposed to everything new : — 

" Habit with him was all the test of truth : 
' It must be right : I've done it from my youth.' 
Questions he answered in as brief a way : 
' It must be wrong — it was of yesterday.' " 



VII.] THE BOBOUOH 113 

Feeble good-nature, and selfish unwillingness to dis- 
turb any existing habits or conventionSj make up his 
character : — 

" In him his flock found nothing to condemn ; 
Him sectaries liked — he never troubled them : 
No trifles failed his yielding mind to please, 
And all his passions sunk in early ease ; 
Nor one so old has left this world of sin, 
More like the being that he entered in." 

An excellent companion sketch to that of the dilet- 
tante vicar is provided in that of the poor curate — the 
scholar, gentleman, and devout Christian, struggling 
against abject poverty to support his large family. 
The picture drawn by Crabbe has a separate and 
interesting origin. A year before the appearance of 
The Boro2(gh, one of the managers of the Literary Fund, 
an institution then of some twenty years' standing, 
and as yet without its charter, applied to Crabbe for a 
copy of verses that might be appropriate for recitation 
at the annual dinner of the society, held at the 
Freemasons' Tavern. It was the custom of the society 
to admit such literary diversions as part of the enter- 
tainment. The notorious William Thomas Fitzgerald 
had been for many years the regular contributor of 
the poem, and his efforts on the occasion are remem- 
bered, if only through the opening couplet of Byron's 
English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, where Fitzgerald 
is gibbeted as the Codrus of Juvenal's satire : — 

" Still must I hear ? shall hoarse Fitzgerald bawl 
His creaking couplets in a Tavern-Hall ? " 

His poem for this year, 1809, is printed at length in 
the Gentleman^ s Magazine for April — and also Crabbe's, 
recited at the same dinner. Crabbe seems to have 



114 CRABBE [CHAP. 

composed it for the occasion, but with, the intention of 
ultimately weaving it into the poem on which he was 
then engaged. A paragraph prefixed to the lines also 
shows that Crabbe had a further object in view. 
"The Founder of this Society having intimated a 
hope that, on a plan which he has already communi- 
cated to his particular Friends, its Funds may be 
sufficiently ample to afford assistance and relief to 
learned officiating Clergymen in distress, though they 
may not have actually commenced Authors — the 
Author, in allusion to this hope, has introduced into 
a Poem which he is preparing for the Press the follow- 
ing character of a learned Divine in distress.'' 

Crabbe's lines bearing on the proposed scheme (which 
seems for a time at least to have been adopted by the 
administrators of the Fund) were left standing when 
The Borough was published, with an explanatory note. 
They are effective for their purpose, the pathos of them 
is genuine, and worthy of attention even in these 
latter days of the "Queen Victoria Clergy Fund." 
The speaker is the curate himself : — 

"Long may these founts of Charity remain, 
And never shrink, but to be filled again ; 
True ! to the Author they are now confined, 
To him who gave the treasure of his mind, 
His time, his health, — and thankless found mankind : 
But there is hope that from these founts may flow 
A side-way stream, and equal good bestow ; 
Good that may reach us, whom the day's distress 
Keeps from the fame and perils of the Press ; 
Whom Study beckons from the Ills of Life, 
And they from Study ; melancholy strife ! 
Who then can say, but bounty now so free, 
And so diffused, may find its way to me ? 



VII.] THE BOROUGH 115 

Yes ! I may see my decent table yet 

Cheered with the meal that adds not to my debt ; 

May talk of those to whom so much we owe, 

And guess their names whom yet we may not know ; 

Blest, we shall say, are those who thus can give, 

And next, who thus upon the bounty live ; 

Then shall I close with thanks my humble meal. 

And feel so well — Oh ! God ! how shall I feel ! " 

Crabbe is known to most readers to-day by the 
deliglitf ul parody of liis style in the Rejected Addresses^ 
which appeared in the autunin of 1812, and it was 
certainly on The Borough that James Smith based his 
imitation. We all remember the incident of Pat 
Jennings's adventure in the gallery of the theatre. 
The manner of the narrative is borrowed from Crabbe's 
lighter and more colloquial style. Every little foible 
of the poet, when in this vein, is copied with great skill. 
The superfluity of information, as in the case of — 

"John Richard William Alexander Dwyer," 

whose only place in the narrative is that he preceded 
Pat Jennings's father in the situation as — 

"Footman to Justinian Stubbs, Esquire " ; 

or again in the detail that — 

" Emanuel Jennings brought his youngest boy 
Up as a corn-cutter — a safe employ " 

(a perfect Crabbian couplet), is imitated throughout. 
Crabbe's habit of frequent verbal antithesis, and even 
of something like punning, is exactly caught in such a 
couplet as : — 

' ' Big-worded bullies who by quarrels live — 
Who give the lie, and tell the lie they give." 

Much of the parody, no doubt, exhibits the fanciful 



116 CRABBE [chap. 

humour of the brothers Smith, rather than of Crabbe, 
as is the case with many parodies. Of course there 
are couplets here and there in Crabbe's narratives 
which justify the burlesque. We have : — 

" What is the truth ? Old Jacob married thrice ; 
He dealt in coals, and avarice was his vice," 

or the lines which the parodists themselves quote in 
their justification : — 

" Something had happened wrong about a Bill 
Which was not drawn with true mercantile skill, 
So to amend it I was told to go, 
And seek the firm of Clutterbuck and Co." 

But lines such as these in fact occur only at long 
intervals. Crabbe's couplets are more often pedestrian 
rather than grotesque. 

The poet himself, as the witty brothers relate with 
some pride, was by no means displeased or offended 
by the liberty taken. When they met in later years 
at William Spencer's, Crabbe hurried to meet James 
Smith with outstretched hand, '' Ah ! my old enemy, 
how do you do ? " Again, writing to a friend who 
had expressed some indignation at the parody, Crabbe 
complained only of the preface. "There is a little 
ill-nature — and I take the liberty of adding, unde- 
served ill-nature — in their prefatory address ; but in 
their versification they have done me admirably." 
Here Crabbe shows a slight lack of self-knowledge. 
For when to the Letter on Trades the following extenu- 
ating postscript is found necessary, there would seem 
to be hardly any room for the parodist : — 

" If I have in this Letter praised the good-humour of a man 
confessedly too inattentive to business, and if in the one on 



VII.] THE BOBOUGH 117 

Amusements^ I have written somewhat sarcastically of ' the 
brick-floored parlour which the butcher lets,' be credit given 
to me that in the one case I had no intention to apologise for 
idleness, nor any design in the other to treat with contempt 
the resources of the poor. The good-humour is considered as 
the consolation of disappointment : and the room is so men- 
tioned because the lodger is vain. Most of my readers will 
perceive this ; but I shall be sorry if by any I am supposed to 
make pleas for the vices of men, or treat their wants and 
infirmities with derision or with disdain." 

After thisj Crabbe himself might have admitted 
that the descent is not very far to the parodist's 
delightful apology for the change from "one haut- 
boy " to " one fiddle " in the description of the band. 
The subsequent explanation, how the poet had pur- 
posely intertwined the various handkerchiefs which 
rescued Pat Jennings's hat from the pit, lest the real 
owner should be detected, and the reason for it, is a 
not less exquisite piece of fooling : " For, in the 
statistical view of life and manners which I occasionally 
present, my clerical profession has taught me how 
extremely improper it would be by any allusion, how- 
ever slight, to give any uneasiness, hoAvever trivial, to 
any individual, however foolish or wicked." It might 
perhaps be inferred from such effusions as are here 
parodied that Crabbe was lacking in a sense of 
humour. This would certainly be too sweeping an 
inference, for in many of .his sketches of human char- 
acter he gives unmistakable proof to the contrary. 
But the talent in question — often so recklessly awarded 
or denied to ns by our fellow-creatures — is very 
variable in the spheres of its operation. The sense of 
humour is, in its essence, as we have often been told, 
largely a sense of proportion, and in this sense Crabbe 



118 CRABBE [chap. 

was certainly deficient. The want of it accounts for 
much more in his writings than for his prose notes and 
prefaces. It explains much of the diffuseness and 
formlessness of his poetry, and his inability to grasp 
the great truth how much the half may be greater 
than the whole. 

In spite, however, of these defects, and of the 
inequalities of the workmanship, The Borough was 
from the first a success. The poem appeared in 
February 1810, and went through six editions in the 
next six years. It does not indeed present an 
alluring picture of life in the provinces. It even 
reminds us of a saying of Tennyson's, that if God 
made the country, and man made the city, then it was 
the devil who made the country-town. To travel 
through the borough from end to end is to pass 
through much ignoble scenery, human and other, and 
under a cloudy heaven, with only rare gleams of sun- 
shine, and patches of blue sky. These, when they 
occur, are proportionably welcome. They include 
some exquisite descriptions of nature, though with 
Crabbe it will be noticed that it is always the nature 
close about his feet, the hedge-row, the meadow, the 
cottage-garden : as his son has noted, his outlook 
never extends to the landscape beyond. 

In the respects just mentioned, the qualities ex- 
hibited in the new poem have been noticed before in 
The Village and The Parish Register. In The Borough^ 
however, appear some maturer specimens of this 
power, showing how Crabbe' s art was perfecting by 
practice. Very noticeable are the sections devoted to 
the almshouse of the borough and its inhabitants. Its 
founder, an eccentric and philanthropic merchant of 



VII.] THE BOROUGH 119 

the place, as well as the tenants of the almshouse 
whose descriptions follow, are all avowedly, like most 
other characters in Crabbe, drawn from life. The 
pious founder, being left without wife or children, lives 
in apparent penury, but while driving all beggars from 
his door, devotes his wealth to secret acts of helpful- 
ness to all his poorer neighbours in distress : — 

" A twofold taste he had ; to give and spare, 
Both were his duties, and had equal care ; 
It was his joy to sit alone and fast, 
Then send a widow and her boys repast : 
Tears in his eyes w^ould, spite of him, appear, 
But he from other eyes has kept the tear : 
All in a wintry night from far he came 
To soothe the sorrows of a suffering dame. 
Whose husband robbed him, and to whom he meant 
A lingering, but reforming punishment : 
Home then he walked, and found his anger rise 
When fire and rushlight met his troubled eyes ; 
But these extinguished, and his prayer addressed 
To Heaven in hope, he calmly sank to rest." 

The good man lived on, until, when his seventieth 
year was past, a building was seen rising on the green 
north of the village — an almshouse for old men and 
women of the borough, who had struggled in life and 
failed. Having built and endowed this harbour of 
refuge, and placed its government in the hands of six 
trustees, the modest donor and the pious lady-relative 
who had shared in his good works passed quietly out 
of life. 

This prelude is followed by an account of the trustees 
who succeeded to the management after the founder's 
death, among them a Sir Denys Brand, a lavish donor 
to the town, but as vulgar and ostentatious as the 



120 CRABBE [chap. 

founder had been humble and modest. This man 
defeats the intentions of the founder by admitting to 
the almshouses persons of the shadiest antecedents, on 
the ground that they at least had been conspicuous in 
their day : — 

" Not men in trade by various loss brought down, 
But those whose glory once amazed the town ; 
Who their last guinea in their pleasure spent, 
Yet never fell so low as to repent : 
To these his pity he could largely deal, 
Wealth they had known, and therefore want could feel." 

From this unfit class of pensioner Crabbe selects 
three for his minute analysis of character. They are, as 
usual, of a very sordid type. The first, a man named 
"Blaney," had his prototype in a half-pay major 
known to Crabbe in his Aldeburgh days, and even the 
tolerant Jeffrey held that the character was rather too 
shameless for poetical treatment. The next inmate 
in order, a woman also drawn from the living model, 
and disguised under the title of Clelia, is a study of 
character and career, drawn with consummate skill. 
Certain abortive attempts of Crabbe to write prose 
fiction have been already mentioned. But this narrative 
of the gradual degradation of a coquette of the lower 
middle class shows that Crabbe possessed at least some 
of the best qualities of a great novelist. Clelia is, in 
fact, a kind of country -town Becky Sharp, whose wiles 
and schemes are not destined to end in a white-washed 
reputation at a fashionable watering-place. On the 
contrary she falls from one ignominy to another until, 
by a gross abuse of a public charity, she ends her days 
in the almshouse ! 



VII.] THE BOBOUGH 121 

One further instance may be cited of Crabbe's per- 
sistent effort to awaken attention to the problem of 
poor-law relief. In his day the question, both as to 
policy and humanity, between indoor and outdoor re- 
lief, was still unsettled. In The Borough, as described, 
many of the helpless poor were relieved at their own 
homes. But a new scheme, " The maintenance of the 
poor in a common mansion erected by the Hundred," 
seems to have been in force in Suffolk, and up to that 
time confined to that county. It differed from the 
workhouse of to-day apparently in this respect, that 
there was not even an attempt to separate the young 
and old, the sick and the healthy, the criminal and 
vicious from the respectable and honest. Yet Crabbe's 
powerful picture of the misery thus caused to the 
deserving class of inmates is not without its lesson 
even after nearly a century during which thought 
and humanity have been continually at work upon 
such problems. The loneliness and weariness of work- 
house existence passed by the aged poor, separated 
from kinsfolk and friends, in "the day-room of a 
London workhouse," have been lately set forth by 
Miss Edith Sellers, in the pages of the Nineteenth Cen- 
tury, with a pathetic incisiveness not less striking than 
that of the following passage from the Eighteenth 
Letter of Crabbe's Borough: — 

" Who can, when here, the social neighbour meet ? 
Who learn the story current in the street ? 
Who to the long-known intimate impart 
Facts they have learned, or feelings of the heart ? 
They talk indeed, but who can choose a friend, 
Or seek companions at their journey's end ? 
Here are not those whom they when infants knew; 
Who, with like fortune, up to manhood grew ; 



122 CRABBE [chap. 

Who, with like troubles, at old age arrived ; 
Who, like themselves, the joy of life survived ; 
Whom time and custom so familiar made, 
That looks the meaning in the mind conveyed : 
But here to strangers, words nor looks impart 
The various movements of the suffering heart ; 
Nor will that heart with those alliance own, 
To whom its views and hopes are all unknown. 
What, if no grievous fears their lives annoy, 
Is it not worse no prospects to enjoy ? 
'Tis cheerless living in such bounded view, 
With nothing dreadful, but with nothing new ; 
Nothing to bring them joy, to make them weep ; 
The day itself is, like the night, asleep." 

The essence of workhouse monotony has surely never 
been better indicated than here. 

The Borough did much to spread Crabbe's reputation 
while he remained, doing his duty to the best of his 
ability and knowledge, in the quiet loneliness of the 
Yale of Belvoir, but his growing fame lay far outside 
the boundaries of his parish. When, a few years later, 
he visited London and was received with general wel- 
come by the distinguished world of literature and the 
arts, he was much surprised. " In my own village," 
he told James Smith, "they think nothing of me." 
The three years following the publication of The 
Borough were specially lonely. He had, indeed, his 
two sons, George and John, with him. They had both 
passed through Cambridge — one at Trinity and the 
other at Caius, and were now in holy orders. Each 
held a curacy in the near neighbourhood, enabling 
them to live under the parental roof. But Mrs. 
Crabbe's condition was now increasingly sad, her mind 
being almost gone. There was no daughter, and we 



VII.] THE BOBOUGH 123 

hear of no other female relative at hand to assist 
Crabbe in the constant watching of the patient. This 
circumstance alone limited his opportunities of accept- 
ing the hospitalities of the neighbourhood, though with 
the Welbys and other county families, as well as with 
the surrounding clergy, he was a welcome guest. 

'Hie Borough appeared in February 1810, and the 
reviewers were prompt in their attention. The Edin- 
burgh reviewed the poem in April of the same year, 
and the Quarterly followed in October. Jeffrey had 
already noticed The Parish Register in 1808. The 
critic's admiration of Crabbe had been, and remained 
to the end, cordial and sincere. But now, in reviewing 
the new volume, a note of warning appears. The critic 
finds himself obliged to admit that the current objec- 
tions to Crabbe's treatment of country life are well 
founded. " His chief fault," he says, " is his frequent 
lapse into disgusting representations." All powerful 
and pathetic poetry, Jeffrey admits, abounds in "images 
of distress," but these images must never excite " dis- 
gust," for that is fatal to the ends which poetry was 
'meant to produce. A few months later the Quarterly 
followed in the same strain, but went on to preach a 
more questionable doctrine. The critic in fact lays 
down the extraordinary canon that the function of 
poetry is not to present any truth, if it happens to be 
unpleasant, but to substitute an agreeable illusion in its 
place. " We turn to poetry," he says, " not that we may 
see and feel what we see and feel in our daily experi- 
ence, but that we may be refreshed by other emotions, 
and fairer prospects, that we may take shelter from the 
realities of life in the paradise of Fancy." 

The appearance of these two prominent reviews to 



124 CRABBE [chap. 

a certain extent influenced the direction of Crabbe's 
genius for the remainder of his life. He evidently- 
had given them earnest consideration, and in the 
preface to the Tales, his next production, he attempted 
something like an answer to each. Without mention- 
ing any names he replies to Jeffrey in the first part 
of his preface, and to the Quarterly reviewer in the 
second. Jeffrey had expressed a hope that Crabbe 
would in future concentrate his powers upon some 
interesting and connected story. "At present it is 
impossible not to regret that so much genius should be 
wasted in making us perfectly acquainted with indi- 
viduals of whom we are to know nothing but their 
characters." Crabbe in reply makes what was really 
the best apology for not accepting this advice. He 
intimates that he had already made the experiment, 
but without success. His peculiar gifts did not fit 
him for it. As he wrote the words, he doubtless had 
in mind the many prose romances that he had written, 
and then consigned to the flames. The short story, or 
rather the exhibition of a single character developed 
through a few incidents, he felt to be the method that 
fitted his talent best. 

Crabbe then proceeds to deal with the question, 
evidently implied by the Quarterly reviewer, how far 
mau}^ passages in The Borough, when concerned with 
low life, were really poetry at all. Crabbe pleads in 
reply the example of other English poets, whose 
claim to the title had never been disputed. He cites 
Chaucer, who had depicted very low life indeed, and 
in the same rhymed metre. "If all that kind of 
satire wherein character is skilfully delineated, must 
no longer be esteemed as genuine poetry," then what be- 



VII.] THE BOROUGH 125 

comes of the author of The Canterbury Tales ? Crabbe 
could not supply, or be expected to supply, the answer 
to this question. He could not discern that the treat- 
ment is everything, and that Chaucer was endowed 
with many qualities denied to himself — the spirit of 
joyousness and the love of sunshine, and together with 
these, gifts of humour and pathos to which Crabbe could 
make no pretension. From Chaucer, Crabbe passes to 
the great but very different master, on whom he had 
first built his style. Was Pope, then, not a poet, 
seeing that he too has "no small portion of this 
actuality of relation, this nudity of description, and 
poetry without an atmosphere " ? Here again, of 
course, Crabbe overlooks one essential difference be- 
tween himself and his model. Both were keen-sighted 
students of character, and both described sordid and 
worldly ambitions. But Pope was strongest exactly 
where Crabbe was weak. He had achieved absolute 
mastery of form, and could condense into a couplet 
some truth which Crabbe expanded, often excellently, 
in a hundred lines of very unequal workmanship. The 
Quarterly reviewer quotes, as admirable of its kind, 
the description in The Borough of the card-club, with 
the bickerings and ill-nature of the old ladies and 
gentlemen who frequented it. It is in truth very 
graphic, and no doubt absolutely faithful to life ; but 
it is rather metrical fiction than poetry. There is 
more of the essence of poetry in a single couplet of 
Pope's : — 

" See how the world its veterans rewards — 
A youth of froUcs, an old age of cards." 

For here the expression is faultless, and Pope has 



126 CRABBE [chap. 

educed an eternally pathetic truth, of universal 
application. 

Even had the gentle remonstrances of the two 
reviewers never been expressed, it would seem as if 
Crabbe had already arrived at somewhat similar con- 
clusions on his own account. At the time the reviews 
appeared, the whole of the twenty-one Tales to be 
published in August 1812 were already written. 
Crabbe had perceived that if he was to retain the 
admiring public he had won, he must break fresh 
ground. Aldeburgh was played out. It had provided 
abundant material and been an excellent training- 
ground for Crabbe's powers. But he had discovered 
that there were other fields worth cultivating besides 
that of the hard lots of the very poor. He had associ- 
ated in his later years with a class above these — not 
indeed with the " upper ten," save when he dined 
at Belvoir Castle, but with classes lying between 
these two extremes. He had come to feel more and 
more the fascination of analysing human character 
and motives among his equals. He had a singularly 
retentive memory, and the habit of noting and brood- 
ing over incidents — specially of " life's little ironies " 
— wherever he encountered them. He does not seem 
to have possessed much originating power. When, a 
few years later, his friend Mrs. Leadbeater inquired 
of him whether the characters in his various poems 
were drawn from life, he replied : " Yes, I will tell 
you readily about my ventures, whom I endeavour to 
paint as nearly as I could, and dare — for in some cases 
I dared not. . . . Thus far you are correct : there is 
not one of whom I had not in my mind the original, but 
I was obliged in most cases to take them from their 



VII.] THE BOROUGH 127 

real situations, and in one or two instances even to 
change their sex, and in many, the circumstances. . . . 
Indeed I d-o not know that I could paint merely from 
my own fancy, and there is no cause why I should. 
Is there not diversity enough in society ? '' 



CHAPTER VIII 

TALES 
(1812) 

Crabbe's new volume — '^ Tales. By the Rev. George 
Crabbe, LL.B.'' — was published by Mr. Hatchard of 
Piccadilly in the summer of 1812. It received a warm 
welcome from the poet's admirers, and was reviewed, 
most appreciatively, by Jeffrey in the Ediyiburgh for 
November. The Tales were twenty-one in number, and 
to each was prefixed a series, often four or five, of 
quotations from Shakespeare, illustrating the incidents 
in the Tales, or the character there depicted. Crabbe's 
knowledge of Shakespeare must have been in those 
days, when concordances were not, very remarkable, 
for he quotes by no means always from the best known 
plays, and he was not a frequenter of the theatre. 
Crabbe had of late studied human nature in books as 
well as in life. 

As already remarked, the Tales are often built upon 
events in his own family, or else occurring within 
their knowledge. The second in order of publication, 
The Parting Hour, arose out of an incident in the life 
of the poet's own brother, which is thus related in the 
notes to the edition of 1834 : — 

"Mr, Crabbe's fourth brother, William, taking to a sea- 
faring Ufe, was made prisoner by the Spaniards: he was 

128 



[chap. VIII.] TALES 129 

carried to Mexico, where he became a silversmith, married, 
and prospered, until his increasing riches attracted a charge 
of Protestantism ; the consequence of which was much per- 
secution. He at last was obliged to abandon Mexico, his 
property, and his family ; and was discovered in the year 
1803 by an Aldeburgh sailor on the coast of Honduras, 
where again he seems to have found some success in business. 
This sailor was the only person he had seen for many a year 
who could tell him anything about Aldeburgh and his family, 
and great was his perplexity when he was informed that his 
eldest brother, George, was a clergyman. 'This cannot be 
our George,' said the wanderer, ' he was a Doctor f This was 
the jBrst, and it was also the last, tidings that ever reached 
Mr. Crabbe of his brother William ; and upon the Alde- 
burgh sailor's story of his casual interview, it is obvious that 
he built this tale." 

The story as developed by Crabbe is pathetic and 
picturesque, reminding us in its central interest of 
Enoch Arden. Allen Booth, the youngest son of his 
parents dwelling in a small seaport, falls early in 
love with a child schoolfellow, for whom his affection 
never falters. When grown up the young man accepts 
an offer from a prosperous kinsman in the West Indies 
to join him in his business. His beloved sees him 
depart \vith many misgivings, though their mutual 
devotion was never to fade. She does not see him 
again for forty years, when he returns, like Arden, to 
his " native bay," — 

"A worn-out man with wither'd limbs and lame. 
His mind oppress'd with woes, and bent with age his frame." 

He finds his old love, who had been faithful to her 
engagement for ten years, and then (believing Allen 
to be dead) had married. She is now a widow, with 
grown-up children scattered through the world, and is 



130 CRABBE [chap. 

alone. Allen then tells his sad story. The ship in 
which he sailed from England had been taken by the 
Spaniards, and he had been carried a slave to the West 
Indies, where he worked in a silver mine, improved his 
position under a kind master, and finally married a 
Spanish girl, hopeless of ever returning to England, 
though still unforgetful of his old love. He accumu- 
lates money, and, like Crabbe's brother, incurs the envy 
of his Roman Catholic neighbours. He is denounced 
as a heretic, who would doubtless bring up his children 
in the accursed English faith. On his refusal to become 
a Catholic he is expelled the country, as the condition 
of his life being spared : — 

" His wife, his children, weeping in his sight, 
All urging him to flee, he fled, and carsed his flight." 

After many adventures he falls in with a ship bound 
for England, but again his return is delayed. He is 
impressed (it was war-time), and fights for his country ; 
loses a limb, is again left upon a foreign shore where his 
education finds him occupation as a clerk ; and finally, 
broken with age and toil, finds his way back to Eng- 
land, where the faithful friend of his youth takes care 
of him and nurses him to the end. The situation at 
the close is very touching — for the joy of reunion is 
clouded by the real love he feels for the Spanish wife 
and children from whom he had been torn, and who 
are continually present to him in his dreams. 

Nor is the treatment inadequate. It is at once dis- 
cernible how much Crabbe had already gained by the 
necessity for concentration upon the development of 
a story instead of on the mere analysis of character. 
The style, moreover, has clarified and gained in 



VIII.] TALES 131 

dignity: there are few, if any, relapses into the 
homelier style on which the parodist could try his 
hand. Had the author of Enoch Arden treated the 
same theme in blank-verse, the workmanship would 
have been finer, but he could hardly have sounded 
a truer note of unexaggerated pathos. 

The same may be said of the beautiful tale of The 
Lover^s Journey. Here again is the product of an 
experience belonging to Crabbe's personal history. 
In his early Aldeburgh days, when he was engaged 
to Sarah Elmy with but faint hope of ever being able 
to marry, it was one of the rare alleviations of his 
distressed condition to walk over from Aldeburgh to 
Beccles (some twenty miles distant), where his betrothed 
was occasionally a visitor to her mother and sisters. 
"It was in his walks," writes the son, "between 
Aldeburgh and Beccles that Mr. Crabbe passed 
through the very scenery described in the first part 
of The Lover's Journey ; while near Beccles, in another 
direction, he found the contrast of rich vegetation 
introduced in the latter part of that tale; nor have 
I any doubt that the disappointment of the story 
figures out something that, on one of these visits, 
befell himself, and the feelings with which he 
received it : — 

" ' Gone to a friend, she tells me ; — I commend 
Her purpose : means she to a female friend ? ' 

For truth compels me to say, that he was by no means 
free from the less amiable sign of a strong attachment 
— jealousy." The story is of the slightest — an incident 
rather than a story. The lover, joyous and buoyant, 
traverses the dreary coast scenery of Suffolk, and 



132 CRABBE [chap. 

because he is happy, finds beauty and charm in the 
commonest and most familiar sights and sounds of 
nature ; every single hedge-row blossom, every group 
of children at their play. The poem is indeed an 
illustration of Coleridge's lines in his ode Dejection : — 

" O Lady, we receive but what we give, 
And in our life alone does Nature live, — 
Ours is lier wedding-garment, ours her shroud." 

All along the road to his beloved's house, nature 
wears this "wedding- garment." On his arrival, how- 
ever, the sun fades suddenly from the landscape. The 
lady is from home : gone to visit a friend a few miles 
distant, not so far but that her lover can follow, — but 
the slight, real or imaginary, probably the latter, 
comes as such a rebuff, that during the " little more — 
how far away ! " that he travels, the country, though 
now richer and lovelier, seems to him (as once to 
Hamlet) a mere "pestilent congregation of vapours." 
But in the end he finds his mistress and learns that 
she had gone on duty, not for pleasure, — and they 
return happy again, and so happy indeed, that he 
has neither eyes nor thoughts for any of nature's 
fertilities or barrennesses — only for the dear one at 
his side. 

I have already had occasion to quote a few lines 
from this beautiful poem, to show Crabbe's minute 
observation — in his time so rare — of flowers and birds 
and all that makes the charm of rural scenery — but 
I must quote some more : — 

" 'Various as beauteous. Nature, is thy face,' 
Exclaim' d Orlando : ' all that grows has grace : 
All are appropriate — bog, and marsh, and fen, 
Are only poor to undiscerning men ; 



VIII.] TALES 133 

Here may the nice and curious eye explore 
How Nature's hand adorns the rushy moor ; 
Here the rare moss in secret shade is found, 
Here the sweet myrtle of the shaking ground ; 
Beauties are these that from the view retire, 
But well repay th' attention they require ; 
For these my Laura will her home forsake, 
And all the pleasures they afford, partake,' " 

And then follows a masterly description of a gipsy- 
encampment on which the lover suddenly comes in 
his travels. Crabbe's treatment of peasant life has 
often been compared to that of divers painters — the 
Dutch school, Hogarth, Wilkie, and others — and the 
following curiously suggests Frederick Walker's fine 
drawing. The Vagrants: — 

"Again, the country was enclosed, a wide 
And sandy road has banks on either side ; 
Where, lo ! a hollow on the left appear'd, 
And there a gipsy tribe their tent had rear'd ; 
'Twas open spread, to catch the morning sun. 
And they had now their early meal begun, 
When two brown boys just left their grassy seat, 
The early Trav'ller with their prayers to greet : 
While yet Orlando held his pence in hand, 
He saw their sister on her duty stand ; 
Some twelve years old, demure, affected, sly, 
Prepared the force of early powers to try ; 
Sudden a look of languor he descries. 
And well-feign'd apprehension in her eyes ; 
Train'd but yet savage in her speaking face, 
He mark'd the features of her vagrant race ; 
When a light laugh and roguish leer express'd 
The vice implanted in her youthful breast : 
Forth from the tent her elder brother came, 
Who seem'd offended, yet forbore to blame 



134 CRABBE [chap. 

The young designer, but could only trace 
The looks of pity in the Trav'ller's face : 
Within, the Father, who from fences nigh 
Had brought the fuel for the fire's supply, 
Watch'd now the feeble blaze, and stood dejected by. 
On ragged rug, just borrow'd from the bed. 
And by the hand of coarse indulgence fed, 
In dirty patchwork negligently dress'd, 
Keclined the Wife, an infant at her breast ; 
In her wild face some touch of grace remain' d, 
Of vigour palsied and of beauty stain' d ; 
Her bloodshot eyes on her unheeding mate 
Were wrathful turn'd, and seem'd her wants to state, 
Cursing his tardy aid — her Mother there 
With gipsy-state engross' d the only chair ; 
Solemn and dull her look ; with such she stands, 
And reads the milk-maid's fortune in her hands, 
Tracing the lines of life ; assumed through years. 
Each feature now the steady falsehood wears : 
With hard and savage eye she views the food. 
And grudging pinches their intruding brood ; 
Last in the group, the worn-out Grandsire sits 
Neglected, lost, and living but by fits : 
Useless, despised, his worthless labours done. 
And half protected by the vicious Son, 
Who half supports him ; he with heavy glance 
Views the young ruffians who around him dance ; 
And, by the sadness in his face, appears 
To trace the progi-ess of their future years : 
Through what strange course of misery, vice, deceit, 
Must wildly wander each unpractised cheat ! 
What shame and grief, what punishment and pain. 
Sport of fierce passions, must each child sustain — 
Ere they like him approach their latter end, 
Without a hope, a comfort, or a friend ! 

" But this Orlando felt not ; ' Rogues,' said he, 
' Doubtless they are, but merry rogues they be ; 



VIII.] TALES 135 

They wander round the land, and be it true 
They break the laws — then let the laws pursue 
The wanton idlers ; for the life they live, 
Acquit I cannot, but I can forgive.' 
This said, a portion from his purse was thrown, 
And every heart seem'd happy like his own." 

Tlie Patron, one of the most carefully elaborated of 
the tales, is on an old and familiar theme. The scorn 
that " patient merit of the unworthy takes " ; the 
misery of the courtier doomed " in suing long to 
bide " ; — the ills that assail the scholar's life, — 

" Toil, envy, want, the Patron and the jail," 

are standing subjects for the moralist and the satirist. 
In Crabbe's poem we have the story of a young man, 
the son of a " Borough-burgess," who, showing some 
real promise as a poet, and having been able to render 
the local Squire some service by his verses at election 
time, is invited in return to pay a visit of some weeks 
at the Squire's country-seat. The Squire has vaguely 
undertaken to find some congenial post for the young 
scholar, whose ideas and ambitions are much in 
advance of those entertained for him in his home. 
The young man has a most agreeable time with his 
new friends. He lives for the while with every refine- 
ment about him, and the. Squire's daughter, a young 
lady of the type of Lady Clara Vere de Vere, 
evidently enjoys the opportunity of breaking a 
country heart for pastime, "ere she goes to town." 
For after a while the family leave for their mansion in 
London, the Squire at parting once more impressing 
on his young guest that he will not forget him. After 
waiting a reasonable time, the young poet repairs to 



136 CRABBE [chap. 

London and seeks to obtain an interview with his 
Patron. After many unsuccessful trials, and rebuffs 
at the door from the servants, a letter is at last sent 
oat to him from their master, coolly advising him to 
abjure all dreams of a literary life and offering him a 
humble post in the Custom House. The young man, 
in bitterness of heart, tries the work for a short time ; 
and then, his health and spirits having utterly failed, 
he returns to his parents' home to die, the father 
thanking God, as he moves away from his son's grave, 
that no other of his children has tastes and talents 
above his position : — 

" ' There lies my Boy,' he cried, ' of care bereft, 
And, Heaven be praised, I've not a genius left : 
No one among ye, sons ! is doomed to hve 
On high-raised hopes of what the Great may give.' " 

Crabbe, who is nothing if not incisive in the drawing of 
his moral, and lays on his colours with no sparing hand, 
represents the heartless Patron and his family as hear- 
ing the sad tidings with quite amazing sangfroid: — 

" Meantime the news througli various channels spread, 
The youth, once favour'd with such praise, was dead : 
' Emma,' the Lady cried, ' my words attend. 
Your siren-smiles have kill'd your humble friend; 
The hope you raised can now delude no more. 
Nor charms, that once inspired, can now restore.' 

" Faint was the flush of anger and of shame, 
That o'er the cheek of conscious beauty came : 
' You censure not,' said she, ' the sun's bright rays, 
When fools imprudent dare the dangerous gaze ; 
And should a stripling look till he were blind. 
You would not justly call the light unkind : 
But is he dead ? and am I to suppose 
The power of poison in such looks as those ? ' 



VIII.] TALES 137 

She spoke, and pointing to the mirror, cast 

A pleased gay glance, and curtsied as she pass'd. 

" My Lord, to whom the poet's fate was told, 
Was much affected, for a man so cold : 
' Dead ! ' said his lordship, ' run distracted, mad ! 
Upon my soul I'm sorry for the lad ; 
And now, no doubt, th' obliging world will say 
That my harsh usage help'd him on his way : 
What ! I suppose, I should have nursed his muse, 
And with champagne have brighten'd up his views ; 
Then had he made me famed my whole life long, 
And stunn'd my ears with gratitude and song. 
Still should the father hear that I regret 
Our joint misfortune — Yes ! I'll not forget." 



» n 



The story, though it has no precise prototype in 
Crabbe's own history, is clearly the fruit of his 
experience of life at Belvoir Castle, combined with 
the sad recollection of his sufferings when only a few 
years before he, a young man with the consciousness 
of talent, was rolling butter-tubs on Slaughden Quay. 
Much of the tale is admirably and forcibly written, 
but again it may be said that it is powerful fiction 
rather than poetry — and indeed into such matters 
poetry can hardly enter. It displays the fine obser- 
vation of Miss Austen, clothed in effective couplets of 
the school of Johnson and Churchill. Yet every now 
and then the true poet comes to the surface. The 
essence of a dank and misty day in late autumn has 
never been seized with more perfect truth than in 
these lines : — 

" Cold grew the foggy morn, the day was brief. 
Loose on the cherry hung the crimson leaf ; 
The dew dwelt ever on the herb ; the woods 
Koar'd with strong blasts, with mighty showers the floods : 



138 CRABBE [chap. 

All green was vanish'd, save of pine and yew, 
That still displayed their melancholy hue ; 
Save the green holly with its berries red, 
And the green moss that o'er the gravel spread." 

The scheme of these detached tales had served to 
develop one special side of Crabbe's talent. The 
analysis of human character, with its strength and 
weakness (but specially the latter), finds fuller exercise 
as the poet has to trace its effects upon the earthly for- 
tunes of the persons portrayed. The tale entitled Tlie 
Gentleman Fanner is a striking illustration in point. 
Jeffrey in his review of the Tales in the Edinburgh 
supplies, as usual, a short abstract of the story, not 
without due insight into its moral. But a profounder 
student of human nature than Jeffrey has, in our own 
day, cited the tale as worthy even to illustrate a 
memorable teaching of St. Paul. The Bishop of 
Worcester, better known as Canon Gore to the thou- 
sands who listened to the discourse in Westminster 
Abbey, finds in this story a perfect illustration of what 
moral freedom is, and what it is often erroneously 
supposed to be : — 

"It is of great practical importance that we should get a 
just idea of what our freedom consists in. There are men 
who, under the impulse of a purely materialist science, declare 
the sense of moral freedom to be an illusion. This is of course 
a gross error. But what has largely played into the hands of 
this error is the exaggerated idea of human freedom which is 
ordinarily current, an idea which can only be held by ignoring 
our true and necessary dependence and limitation. It is this 
that we need to have brought home to us. There is an admi- 
rable story among George Crabbe's Tales called ' The Gentle- 
man Farmer.' The hero starts in life resolved that he will 
not put up with any bondage. The orthodox clergyman, 



viii.] TALES 139 

the orthodox physician, and orthodox matrimony — all these 
alike represent social bondage in different forms, and he will 
have none of them. So he starts on a career of ' unchartered 
freedom," — 

' To prove that he alone was king ofhim,^ 

and the last scene of all represents him the weak slave of 
his mistress, a quack doctor, and a revivalist —' which things 
are an allegory.' " 

The quotation shows that Crabbe, neglected by the 
readers of poetry to-day, is still cherished by the 
psychologist and divine. It is to the '^ graver mind" 
rather than to the " lighter heart" that he oftenest ap- 
peals. Newman, to mention no small names, found 
Crabbe's pathos and fidelity to Huinan Nature even 
more attractive to him in advanced years than in youth. 
There is indeed much in common between Crabbe's 
treatment of life and its problems, and Newman's. 
Both may be called "stern" portrayers of human 
nature, not only as intended in Byron's famous line, 
but in Wordsw^orth's use of the epithet when he in- 
voked Duty as the " stern Daughter of the voice of 
God." A kindred lesson to that drawn by Canon 
Gore from The Oentleynan Farmer is taught in the yet 
grimmer tale of Edward Shore. The story, as sum- 
marised by Jeffrey, is as follows : — 

*' The hero is a young man of aspiring genius and enthusi- 
astic temper with an ardent love of virtue, but no settled 
principles either of conduct or opinion. He first conceives an 
attachment for an amiable girl, who is captivated with his 
conversation ; but, being too poor to marry, soon comes to 
spend more of his time in the family of an elderly sceptic of 
his acquaintance, who had recently married a young wife, and 
placed unbounded confidence in her virtue, and the honour of 



140 CRABBE [chap. 

his friend. In a moment of temptation they abuse this 
conscience. The husband renounces him with dignified com- 
posure ; and he falls at once from the romantic pride of his 
virtue. He then seeks the company of the dissipated and 
gay, and ruins his health and fortune without regaining his 
tranquillity. When in gaol and miserable, he is relieved by 
an unknown hand, and traces the benefaction to the friend 
whose former kindness he had so ill repaid. This humilia- 
tion falls upon his proud spirit and shattered nerves with an 
overwhelming force, and his reason fails beneath it. He is 
for some time a raving maniac, and then falls into a state of 
gay and compassionable imbecility, which is described with 
inimitable beauty in the close of this story." 

Jeffrey's abstract is fairly accurate, save in one 
particular. Edward Shore can hardly be said to feel 
an " ardent love of virtue." Eather is he perfectly 
confident of his respectability, and bitterly contemp- 
tuous of those who maintain the necessity of religion 
to control men's unruly passions. His own lofty 
conceptions of the dignity of human nature are 
sufficient for himself : — 

" ' While reason guides me, I shall walk aright, 
Nor need a steadier hand, or stronger light ; 
Nor this in dread of awful threats, design'd 
For the weak spirit and the grov'ling mind ; 
But that, engaged by thoughts and views sublime, 
I wage free war with grossness and with crime.' 
Thus look'd he proudly on the vulgar crew. 
Whom statutes govern, and whom fears subdue." 

As motto for this story Crabbe quotes the fine speech 
of Henry Y. on discovering the treachery of Lord 
Scrope, whose character had hitherto seemed so im- 
maculate. The comparison thus suggested is not as 
felicitous as in many of Crabbe's citations. Had In 



viir.] TALES 141 

Memoriam been then written, a more exact parallel 
might have been found in Tennyson's warning to the 
young enthusiast : — 

" See thou, that countest reason ripe 
111 holding by the law within, 
Thou fail not in a world of sin, 
And ev'n for want of such a type." 

The story is for the most part admirably told. The 
unhappy man, reduced to idiocy of a harmless kind, 
and the common playmate of the village children, 
is encountered now and then by the once loved maid, 
who might have made him happy : — 

" Kindly she chides his boyish flights, while he 
Will for a moment fix'd and pensive be ; 
And as she trembling speaks, his lively eyes 
Explore her looks ; he listens to her sighs ; 
Charm'd by her voice, th' harmonious sounds invade 
His clouded mind, and for a time persuade : 
Like a pleased infant, who has newly caught 
From the maternal glance a gleam of thought, 
He stands enrapt, the half-known voice to hear, 
And starts, half conscious, at the falling tear. 

" Rarely from town, nor then unwatch'd, he goes, 
In darker mood, as if to hide his woes ; 
Returning soon, he with impatience seeks 
His youthful friends, and shouts, and sings, and speaks ; 
Speaks a wild speech with action all as wild — 
The children's leader, and himself a child ; 
He spins their top, or at their bidding bends 
His back, while o'er it leap his laughing friends ; 
Simple and weak, he acts the boy once more. 
And heedless children call him Silly Shore.^^ 

In striking contrast to the prevailing tone of the 



142 CRABBE [chap. 

other tales is the charming story, conceived in a vein 
of purest comedy, called 21ie Frank Courtship. This 
tale alone should be a decisive answer to those who 
have doubted Crabbe's possession of the gift of 
humour, and on this occasion he has refrained from 
letting one dark shadow fall across his picture. It 
tells of one Jonas Kindred, a wealthy puritanic Dis- 
senter of narrowest creed and masterful temper. He 
has an only daughter, the pride of her parents, and 
brought up by them in the strictest tenets of the sect. 
Her father has a widowed and childless sister, with a 
comfortable fortune, living in some distant town; and 
in pity of her solitary condition he allows his natu- 
rally vivacious daughter to spend the greater part of 
the year with her aunt. The aunt does not share the 
prejudices of her brother's household. She likes her 
game of cards and other social joys, and is quite a 
leader of fashion in her little town. To this life and 
its enjoyments the beautiful and clever Sybil takes 
very kindly, and unfolds many attractive graces. 
Once a year the aunt and niece by arrangement spend 
a few weeks in Sybil's old home. The aunt, with 
much serpentine wisdom, arranges that she and her 
niece shall adapt themselves to this very different 
atmosphere — eschew cards, attend regularly at chapel, 
and comply with the tone and habits of the family. 
The niece, however, is really as good as she is pretty, 
and her conscience smites her for deceiving her father, 
of whom she is genuinely fond. She stands before 
him " pure, pensive, simple, sad," — yet — 

" the damsel's heart, 
When Jonas praised, reproved her for the part ; 



VIII.] TALES 143 

Eor Sybil, fond of pleasure, gay and light, 
Had still a secret bias to the right ; 
Vain as she was — and flattery made her vain — 
Her simulation gave her bosom pain." 

As time wears on, however, tliis state of things must 
come to a close. Jonas is anxious that his daughter 
shall marry suitably, and he finds among his neigh- 
bours an admirable young man, a staunch member of 
the " persuasion," and well furnished in this world's 
goods. He calls his daughter home, that she may be 
at once introduced to her future husband, for the father 
is as certain as Sir Anthony Absolute himself that 
daughters should accept what is offered them and ask 
no questions. Sybil is by no means unwilling to enter 
the holy state, if the right man can be found. Indeed, 
she is wearying of the aimless life she lives with her 
worldly aunt, and the gradual change in her thoughts 
and hopes is indicated in a passage of much delicacy 
and insight : — 

" Jonas now ask'd his daughter — and the Aunt, 
Though loth to lose her, was obliged to grant : — 
But would not Sybil to the matron cling, 
And fear to leave the shelter of her wing ? 
No ! in the young there lives a love of change. 
And to the easy they prefer the strange ! 
Then, too, the joys she once pursued with zeal. 
From whist and visits sprung, she ceased to feel : 
When with the matrons Sybil first sat down, 
To cut for partners and to stake her crown. 
This to the youthful maid preferment seem'd. 
Who thought what woman she was then esteem'd ; 
But in few years, when she perceived indeed 
The real woman to the girl succeed. 
No longer tricks and honours fill'd her mind, 
not so well defined ; 



144 CPvABBE [chap. 

She then reluctant grew, and thought it hard 

To sit and ponder o'er an ugly card ; 

Rather the nut-tree shade the nymph preferr'd, 

Pleased with the pensive gloom and evening bird ; 

Thither, from company retired, she took 

The silent walk, or read the fav'rite book." 

The interview between Sybil and the young man is 
conceived with real skill and humour. The young 
lady receives her lover, prepared to treat him with 
gentle mockery and to keep him at a convenient 
distance. The young lover is not daunted, and 
plainly warns her against the consequences of such 
levity. But as the little duel proceeds, each gradually 
detects the real good that underlies the surface 
qualities of the other. In spite of his formalism, 
Sybil discerns that her lover is full of good sense and 
feeling ; and he makes the same discovery with regard 
to the young lady's badinage. And then, after a 
conflict of wits that seems to terminate without any 
actual result, the anxious father approaches his child 
with a final appeal to her sense of filial duty : — 

" With anger fraught, but willing to persuade, 
The wrathful father met the smiling maid : 
' Sybil,' said he, ' I long, and yet I dread 
To know thy conduct — hath Josiah fled ? 
And, grieved and fretted by thy scornful air, 
For his lost peace, betaken him to prayer ? 
Couldst thou his pure and modest mind distress 
By vile remarks upon his speech, address. 
Attire, and voice ?' — ' All this I must confess.' 
' Unhappy child ! what labour will it cost 
To win him back ! ' — ' I do not think him lost.' 
' Courts he then (trifler !) insult and disdain ? ' — 
' No ; but from these he courts me to refrain.' 



VIII.] TALES 145 

' Then hear me, Sybil : should Josiah leave 

Thy father's house ? ' — ' My father's child would grieve.' 

' That is of grace, and if he come again 

To speak of love ? ' — 'I might from grief refrain.' 

' Then wilt thou, darughter, our design embrace ? ' — 

' Can I resist it, if it be of grace ? ' 

' Dear child ! in three plain words thy mind express : 

Wilt thou have this good youth ? ' — ' Dear father ! yes.' " 

All the characters in the story — the martinet 
father and his poor crushed wife, as well as the pair 
of lovers — are indicated with an appreciation of the 
value of dramatic contrast that might make the little 
story effective on the stage. One of the tales in this 
collection, Tlie Confidant, was actually turned into a 
little drama in blank verse by Charles Lamb, under 
the changed title of The Wife^s Trial : or the. Intruding 
Widow. The story of Crabbe's Confidant is not 
pleasant ; and Lamb thought well to modify it, so as 
to diminish the gravity of the secret of which the 
malicious friend was possessed. There is nothing but 
what is sweet and attractive in the little comedy of 
Tlie Frank CourtsJiip, and it might well be com- 
mended to the dexterous and sympathetic hand of 
Mr. J. M. Barrie. 



CHAPTER IX 

VISITIXG IN LONDON 
(1812-1819) 

In the margin of FitzGerald's copy of the Memoir an 
extract is quoted from Crabbe's Diary : " 1810, Nov. 7. 
— Finish Tales. Not happy hour." The poet's com- 
ment may have meant something more than that so 
many of his tales dealt with sad instances of human 
frailty. At that moment, and for three years longer, 
there hung over Crabbe's family life a cloud that never 
lifted — the hopeless illness of his wife. Two years 
before, Southey, in answer to a friend who had made 
some reference to Crabbe and his poetry, Avrites : — 

" With Crabbe's poems I have been acquainted for about 
twenty years, having read them when a schoolboy on their 
first publication, and, by the help of Elegant Extracts^ remem- 
bered from that time what was best worth remembering. 
You rightly compare him to Goldsmith. He is an imitator, 
or rather an antithesizer of Goldsmith, if such a word may be 
coined for the occasion. His merit is precisely the same as 
Goldsmith's — that of describing things clearly and strikingly ; 
but there is a wide difference between the colouring of the 
two poets. Goldsmith threw a sunshine over all his pictures, 
like that of one of our water-colour artists when he paints 
for ladies — a light and a beauty not to be found in Nature, 
though not more brilliant or beautiful than what Nature 
really affords ; Crabbe's have a gloom which is also not in 
Nature — not the shade of a heavy day, of mist, or of clouds, 

146 



[chap. IX.] LAST YEARS AT MUSTON 147 

but the dark and overcharged shadows of one who paints by 
lamplight — whose very lights have a gloominess. In part 
this is explained by his history." 

Soutliey's letter was written in September 1808, 
before either The Borough or the Tales was published, 
which may account for the inadequacy of his criticism 
on Crabbe's poetry. But the above passage throws 
light upon a period in Crabbe's history to which his 
son naturally does little more than refer in general 
and guarded terms. In a subsequent passage of the 
letter already quoted, we are reminded that as early 
as the year 1803 Mrs. Crabbe's mental derangement 
was familiarly known to her friends. 

But now, when his latest book was at last in print, 
and attracting general attention, the end of Crabbe's 
long watching was not far off. In the summer of 1813 
Mrs. Crabbe had rallied so far as to express a wish to 
see London again, and the father and mother and two 
sons spent nearly three months in rooms in a hotel. 
Crabbe was able to visit Dudley North, and other of 
his old friends, and to enter to some extent into the 
gaieties of the town, but also, as always, taking advan- 
tage of the return to London to visit and help the 
poor and distressed, not unmindful of his own want 
and misery in the great city thirty years before. The 
family returned to Muston in September, and towards 
the close of the month Mrs. Crabbe was released from 
her long disease. On the north wall of the chancel of 
Muston Church, close to the altar, is a plain marble 
slab recording that not far away lie the remains of 
" Sarah, wife of the Rev. George Crabbe, late Rector 
of this Parish." 

Within two days of the wife's death Crabbe fell ill 



148 CKABBE [chap. 

of a serious malady, worn out as lie was with long 
anxiety and grief. He was for a few days in danger 
of his life, and so well aware of his condition that he 
desired that his wife's grave " might not be closed till 
it was seen whether he should recover." He rallied, 
however, and returned to the duties of his parish, and 
to a life of still deeper loneliness. But his old friends 
at Belvoir Castle once more came to his deliverance. 
AVithin a short time the Duke offered him the living 
of Trowbridge in Wiltshire, a small manufacturing 
town, on the line (as we should describe it to-day) 
between Bath and Salisbury. The value of the prefer- 
ment was not as great as that of the joint livings of 
Muston and Allington, so that poor Crabbe was once 
more doomed to be a pluralist, and to accept, also at 
the Duke's hands, the vicarage of Croxton Kerrial, 
near Belvoir Castle, where, however, he never resided. 
And now the time came for Crabbe's final move, and 
rector of Trowbridge he was to remain for the rest of 
his life. He was glad to leave Muston, which now had 
for him the saddest of associations. He had never 
been happy there, for reasons we have seen. What 
Crabbe's son calls " diversity of religious sentiment " 
had produced " a coolness in some of his parishioners, 
which he felt the more painfully because, whatever 
might be their difference of opinion, he was ever ready 
to help and oblige them all by medical and other aid 
to the utmost extent of his power." So that in leav- 
ing Muston he was not, as was evident, leaving many 
to lament his departure. Indeed, malignity was so 
active in one quarter that the bells of the parish 
church were rung to welcome Crabbe's successor 
before Crabbe and his sons had quitted the house ! 



IX.] LAST YEAES AT MUSTON 149 

For other reasons, perhaps, Crabbe prepared to leave 
his two livings with a sense of relief. His wife's death 
had cast a permanent shadow over the landscape. The 
neighbouring gentry were kindly disposed, but prob- 
ably not wholly sympathetic. It is clear that there 
w^as a certain rusticity about Crabbe ; and his politics, 
such as they were, had been formed in a different school 
from that of the county families. A busy country 
tov/n was likely to furnish interests and distractions 
of a different kind. But before finally quitting the 
neighbourhood he visited a sister at Aldeburgh, and, 
his son writes, "one day was given to a solitary 
ramble among the scenery of bygone years — Parham 
and the woods of Glemham, then in the first blossom 
of May. He did not return until night ; and in his 
note-book I find the following brief record of this 
mournful visit : — 

" ' Yes, I behold again the place, 

The seat of joy, the source of pain ; 
It brings in view the form and face 
That I must never see again. 

" ' The niglit-bird's song that sweetly floats 
On this soft gloom — this balmy air — 
Brings to the mind her sweeter notes 
That I again must never hear. 

" ' Lo ! yonder shines that window's light, 
My guide, my token, heretofore ; 
And now again it shines as bright, 

When those dear eyes can shine no more. 

" ' Then hurry from this place away ! 
It gives not now the bliss it gave ; 
Eor Death has made its charm his prey, 
And joy is buried in her grave.' " 



150 CRABBE [chap. 

In family relationships, and indeed all others, 



Crabbe's tenderness was never wantine:, and the ver 



JDJ 



'se 



that follows was found long afterwards written on a 
paper in which his wife's wedding-ring, nearly worn 
through before she died, was wrapped : — 

" The ring so worn, as you behold, 
So thin, so pale, is yet of gold : 
The passion such it was to prove ; 
Worn with life's cares, love yet was love." 

Crabbe was inducted to the living of Trowbridge on 
the 3rd of June 1814, and preached his first sermon 
two days later. His two sons followed him, as soon 
as their existing engagements allowed them to leave 
Leicestershire. The younger, John, who married in 
1816, became his father's curate, and the elder, who 
married a year later, became curate at Pucklechurch, 
not many miles distant. As Crabbe's old cheerfulness 
gradually returned he found much congenial society in 
the better educated classes about him. Plis reputation 
as a poet was daily spreading. The Tales passed from 
edition to edition, and brought him many admirers 
and sympathisers. The "busy, populous clothing 
towD," as he described Trowbridge to a friend, provided 
him with intelligent neighbours of a class different 
from any he had yet been thrown with. And yet once 
more, as his son has to admit, he failed to secure 
the allegiance of the church-going parishioners. His 
immediate predecessor, a curate in charge, had been 
one of those in whom a more passionate missionary 
zeal had been stirred by the INIethodist movement — 
" endeared to the more serious inhabitants by warm zeal 
and a powerful talent for preaching extempore." The 



IX.] AT TROWBRIDGE 151 

X^arisliioners had made urgent appeal to the noble 
patron to appoint this man to the benefice, and the 
Duke's disregard of their petition had produced much 
bitterness in the parish. Then, again, in Crabbe there 
was a ''lay " element, which had probably not been f ouiid 
in his predecessor, and he might occasionally be seen 
"at a concert, a ball, or even a play." And finally, 
not long after his arrival, he took the unpopular side 
in an election for the representation of the county. 
The candidate he supported was sti'ongiy opposed by 
the "manufacturing interest," and Crabbe. became the 
object of intense dislike at the time of the election, so 
much so that a violent mob attempted to prevent his 
leaving his house to go to the poll. However, Crabbe 
showed the utmost courage during the excitement, 
and his other fine qualities of sterling worth and 
kindness of heart ultimately made their way ; and 
in the sixteen years that followed, Crabbe took still 
firmer hold of the affection of the worthier part of 
his parishioners. 

Crabbe's son thought good to devote several j^ages 
of his Memoir to the question why his father, having 
now no unmarried son to be his companion, should not 
have taken such a sensible step as to marry again. For 
the old man, if he deserved to be so called at the age 
of sixty-two, was still very susceptible to the charms 
of female society, and indeed not wholly free from the 
habit of philandering — a habit which occasionally 
" inspired feelings of no ordinary warmth " in the fair 
objects of "his vain devotion." One such incident 
all but ended in a permanent engagement. A ms. 
quotation from the poet's Diary, copied in the mar- 
gin of EitzGerald's volume, may possibly refer to 



152 CRABBE [chap. 

this occasion. Under date of September 22 occurs 
this entry : " Sidmouth. Miss Ridout. Declaration. 
Acceptance." But under October 5 is written the 
ominous word, " Mr. Eidout." And later : " Dec. 12. 
Charlotte's picture returned." A tragedy (or was it a 
comedy ?) seems written in these few words. Edward 
FitzGerald adds to this his own note : " Miss Eidout I 
remember — an elegant spinster ; friend of my mother's. 
About 1825 she had been at Sidmouth, and known 
Crabbe." The son quotes some very ardent verses 
belonging to this period, but not assignable to any 
particular charmer, such as one set beginning : — 

"And wilt thou never smile again ; 
Thy cruel purpose never shaken ? 
Hast thou no feeling for my pain, 
Refused, disdain'd, despised, forsaken ? " 

The son indicates these amiable foibles in a filial 
tone and in apologetic terms, but the " liberal shep- 
herds " sometimes spoke more frankly. An old squire 
remarked to a friend in reference to this subject, 
"D — mme, sir! the very first time Crabbe dined at 
my house he made love to my sister ! " And a lady 
is known to have complained that on a similar occa- 
sion Crabbe had exhibited so much warmth of manner 
that she "felt quite frightened." His son entirely 
supports the same view as to his father's almost 
demonstratively affectionate manner towards ladies 
who interested him, and who, perhaps owing to his 
rising repute as an author, showed a corresponding 
interest in the elderly poet. Crabbe himself admits 
"the soft impeachment." In a letter to his newly 
found correspondent, Mrs. Leadbeater (granddaughter 



IX.] AT TROWBRIDGE 153 

of Burke's old schoolmaster, Kichard Shackleton), 
he confesses that women were more to him than 
men : — 

" I am alone now ; and since my removing into a busy town 
among the multitude, the loneliness is but more apparent and 
more melancholy. But this is only at certain times ; and then 
I have, though at considerable distances, six female friends, 
unknown to each other, but all dear, very dear, to me. With 
men I do not much associate ; not as deserting, and much less 
disliking, the male part of society, but as being unfit for it ; 
not hardy nor grave, not knowing enough, nor sufficiently 
acquainted with the everyday concerns of men. But my 
beloved creatures have minds with which I can better assimi- 
late. Think of you, 1 must ; and of me, I must entreat that 
you would not be unmindful." 

Nothing, however, was destined to come of these 
various flirtations or tendresses. The new duties at 
Trowbridge, with their multiplying calls upon his 
attention and sympathies, must soon have filled his 
time and attention when at work in his market town, 
with its flourishing woollen manufactures. And Crabbe 
was now to have opened to him new sources of interest 
in the neighbourhood. His growing reputation soon 
made him a welcome guest in many houses to which his 
mere position as vicar of Trowbridge might not have 
admitted him. Trowbridge was only a score or so 
of miles from Bath, and there were many noblemen's 
and gentlemen's seats in the country round. In this 
same county of Wilts, and not very far away, at his 
vicarage of Bremhill, was William Lisle Bowles, the 
graceful poet whose sonnets five-and-twenty years 
before had first roused to poetic utterance the young 
Coleridge and Charles Lamb when at Christ's Hospital. 



154 CKABBE [chap. 

Through Bowles, Crabbe was introduced to the noble 
family at Bowood, where the third Marquis of Laus- 
downe delighted to welcome those distinguished in 
literature and the arts. Within these splendid walls 
Crabbe first made the acquaintance of Eogers, which 
soon ripened into an intiiuacy not without effect, I 
think, upon the remaining efforts of Crabbe as a poet. 
One immediate result was that Crabbe yielded to 
Rogers's strong advice to him to visit London, and take 
his place among the literary society of the day. This 
visit was paid in the summer of 1817, when Crabbe 
stayed in London from the middle of June to the end 
of July. 

Crabbe's son rightly included in his Meinoir several 
extracts from his father's Diary kept during this visit. 
They are little more than briefest entries of engage- 
ments, but serve to show the new and brilliant life to 
which the poet was suddenly introduced. He con- 
stantly dined and breakfasted with Bogers, where he 
met and was welcomed by Bogers's friends. His old 
acquaintance with Fox gave him the entree of Holland 
House, Thomas Campbell was specially polite to 
him, and really attracted by him. Crabbe visited 
the theatres, and was present at the farewell banquet 
given to John Kemble. Through Bogers and Campbell 
he was introduced to John Murray of Albemarle Street, 
who later became his publisher. He sat for his portrait 
to Pickersgill and Phillips, and saw the painting by 
the latter hanging on the Academy walls when dining 
at their annual banquet. Again, through an introduc- 
tion at Bath to Samuel Hoare of Hampstead, Crabbe 
formed a friendship with him and his family of the 
most affectionate nature. During the first and all later 



IX.] VISITING m LONDON 



155 



visits to London Crabbe was most often their guest 
at the mansion on the summit of the famous " Northern 
Height/' with which, after Crabbe's death, Wordsworth 
so touchingly associated his name, in the lines written 
on the death of the Ettrick Shepherd and his brother- 
poets : — 

" Our haughty life is crowned with darkness, 
Like London with its own black wreath, 
On which with thee, Crabbe, forth looking, 
I gazed from Hampstead's breezy heath." 

Between Samuel Hoare's hospitable roof and the 
Hummums in Covent Garden Crabbe seems to have 
alternated, according as his engagements in town 
required. 

But although living, as the Diary shows, in daily 
intercourse with the literary and artistic world, tasting 
delights which were absolutely new to him, Crabbe 
never forgot either his humble friends in Wiltshire, 
or the claims of his own art. He kept in touch with 
Trowbridge, where his son John was in charge, and 
sends instructions from time to time as to poor pen- 
sioners and others who were not to be neglected in the 
weekly ministrations. At the same time, he seems 
rarely to have omitted the self-imposed task of adding 
daily to the pile of manuscript on which he was at 
work — the collection of stories to be subsequently 
issued as Tales of the Hall. Crabbe had resolved, in the 
face of whatever distractions, to write if possible a fixed 
amount every day. More than once in the Diary 
occur such entries as : " My thirty lines done ; but not 
well, I fear." " Thirty lines to-day, but not yesterday 
— must work up." This anticipation of a method made 
famous later in the century by Anthony Trollope may 



156 CKABBE [chap. 

account (as also in Trollope's case) for certain marked 
inequalities in the merit of the work thus turned out. 
At odd times and in odd i)laces were these verses some- 
times composed. On a certain Sunday morning in 
July 1817, after going to church at St. James's, 
Piccadilly (or was it the Chapel Eoyal ?), Crabbe 
wandered eastward and found inspiration in the 
most unexpected quarter : " Write some lines in the 
solitude of Somerset House, not fift}^ yards from 
the Thames on one side, and the Strand on the other ; 
but as quiet as the sands of Arabia. I am not quite 
in good humour with this day ; but, happily, I cannot 
say why." 

The last mysterious sentence is one of many scattered 
through the Diary, which, aided by dashes and omis- 
sion-marks by the editorial son, point to certain senti- 
mentalisms in which Crabbe was still indulging, even 
in the vortex of fashionable gaieties. We gather 
throughout that the ladies he met interested him 
quite as much, or even more, than the distinguished 
men of letters, and there are allusions besides to 
other charmers at a distance. The following entry 
immediately precedes that of the Sunday just 
quoted : — 

" 14th. — Some more intimate conversation this morning with 
Mr. and Mrs. Moore. They mean to go to Trowbridge. He 
is going to Paris but will not stay long. Mrs. Spencer's 
album. Agree to dine at Curzon Street. A welcome letter 

from . This makes the day more cheerful. Suppose it 

were so. Well, 'tis not ! Go to Mr. Rogers, and take a fare- 
well visit to Highbury. Miss Rogers. Promise to go when 

, Return early. Dine there, and purpose to see Mr. 

Moore and Mr. Rogers in the morning when they set out for 
Calais." 



IX.] VISITING IN LONDON 157 

On the whole, however, Crabbe may have found, 
when these fascinating experiences were over, tliat 
there had been safety in a multitude. For he seems 
to have been equally charmed with Kogers's sister, 
and William Spencer's daughter, and the Countess 
of Bessborough, and a certain Mrs. Wilson, — and, 
like Miss Snevellicci's papa, to have ^' loved them 
every one." 

Meanwhile Crabbe was working steadily, while in 
London, at his new poems. Though his minimum 
output was thirty lines a day, he often produced more, 
and on one occasion he records eighty lines as the 
fruit of a day's labour. During the year 1818 he was 
still at work, and in September of that year he writes 
to Mary Leadbeater that his verses "are not yet 
entirely ready, but do not want much that he can 
give them." He was evidently correcting and perfect- 
ing to the best of his ability, and (as I believe) profit- 
ing by the intellectual stimulus of his visit to London, 
as well as by the higher standards of versification that 
he had met with, even in writers inferior to himself. 
The six weeks in London had given him advantages 
he had never enjoyed before. In his early days under 
Burke's roof he had learned much from Burke himself, 
and from Johnson and Fox, but he was then only a 
promising beginner. Now, thirty-five years later, he 
met Kogers, W^ordsworth; Campbell, Moore, as social 
equals, and having, like them, won a public for him- 
self. When his next volumes appeared, the workman- 
ship proved, as of old, unequal, but here and there 
Crabbe showed a musical ear, and an individuality 
of touch of a different order from anything he had 
achieved before. Mr. Courthope and other critics hold 



158 CEABBE [chap. 

that there are passages in Crabbe's earliest poems, 
such as The Village, which have a metrical charm he 
never afterwards attained. But I strongly suspect that 
in such passages Crabbe had owed much to the revis- 
ing hand of Burke, Johnson, and Fox. 

In the spring of 1819 Crabbe was again in town, 
visiting at Holland House, and dining at the Thatched 
House with the " Literary Society," of which he had 
been elected a member, and which to-day still dines 
and prospers. He was then preparing for the publica- 
tion of his new tales, from the famous house in Albe- 
marle Street. Two years before, in 1817, on the 
strength doubtless of Eogers's strong recommendation, 
Murray had made a very liberal offer for the new 
poems, and the copyright of all Crabbe's previous works. 
For these, together, Murray had offered three thou- 
sand pounds. Strangely enough, Rogers was at first 
dissatisfied with the offer, holding that the sum should 
be paid for the new volumes alone. He and a friend 
(possibly Campbell), who had conducted the negotia- 
tion, accordingly went off to the house of Longman to 
see if they could not get better terms. To their great 
discomfiture the Longmans only offered £1000 for the 
privilege that Murray had valued at three times the 
amount; and Crabbe and his friends were placed in a 
difficult position. A letter of Moore to John Murray 
many years afterwards, when Crabbe's Memoir was in 
preparation, tells the sequel of the story, and it may 
well be given in his words : — 

"In this crisis it was that Mr. Rogers and myself, anxious 
to relieve our poor friend from his suspense, called upon 
you, as you must well remember, in Albemarle Street ; and 
seldom have I watched a countenance with more solicitude, 



IX.] VISITING IN LONDON 159 

or heard words that gave me much more pleasure than 
when, on the subject being mentioned, you said 'Oh! yes. 
I have heard from Mr. Crabbe, and look upon the matter as 
all settled.' I was rather pressed, I remember, for time that 
morning, having an appointment on some business of my 
own, but ,Mr. Rogers insisted that I should accompany him 
to Crabbe' s lodgings, and enjoy the pleasure of seeing him 
relieved from his suspense. We found him sitting in his 
room, alone, and expecting the worst ; but soon dissipated 
all his fears by the agreeable intelligence which we brought. 

" When he received the bills for £3000, we earnestly advised 
that he should, without delay, deposit them in some safe hands ; 
but no — he must take them with him to Trowbridge, and show 
them to his son John. They would hardly believe in his 
good luck, at home, if they did not see the bills. On his 
way down to Trowbridge, a friend at Salisbury, at whose 
house he rested (Mr. Everett, the banker), seeing that he 
carried these bills loosely in his waistcoat pocket, requested 
to be allowed to take charge of them for him : but with 
equal ill success. ' There was no fear,' he said, 'of his losing 
them, and he must show them to his son John.' " 

It was matter of common knowledge in the literary 
world of Crabbe's day that John Murray did not 
on this occasion make a very prudent bargain, and 
that in fact he lost heavily by his venture. No doubt 
his offer was based upon the remarkable success 
of Crabbe's two preceding poems. The Borough had 
passed through six editions in the same number of 
years, and the Tales reached a fifth edition within two 
years of publication. But for changes in progress in 
the poetic taste of the time, Murra}^ might safely have 
anticipated a continuance of Crabbe's popularity. But 
seven years had elapsed since the appearance of the 
Tales, and in these seven years much had happened. 
Byron had given to the world one by one the four 



160 CRABBE [chap. 

cantos of Chilcle Harold, as well as other poems rich in 
splendid rhetoric and a lyric versatility far beyond 
Crabbe's reach. Wordsworth's two volumes in 1815 
contained by far the most important and representa- 
tive of his poems, and these were slowly but surely 
winning him a public of his owu, intellectual and 
thoughtful if not as yet numerous. John Keats had 
made two appearances, in 1817 and 1818, and the year 
following the publication of Crabbe's Tales of the 
Hall was to add to them the Odes and other poems 
(constituting the priceless volume of 1820 — Lamia and 
other Poems. Again, for the lovers of fiction — whom, 
as I have said, Crabbe had attracted quite as strongly 
as the lovers of verse — Walter Scott had produced five 
or six of his finest novels, and was adding to the circle 
of his admirers daily. By the side of this fascinating 
prose, and still more fascinating metrical versatility, 
Crabbe's resolute and plodding couplets might often 
seem tame and wearisome. Indeed, at this juncture, 
the rhymed heroic couplet, as a vehicle for the poetry of 
imagination, was tottering to its fall, though it lingered 
for many years as the orthodox form for university prize 
poems, and for occasional didactic or satirical effusions. 
Crabbe, very wisely, remained faithful to the metre. 
Por his purpose, and with his subjects and special gifts, 
none probably would have served him better. For 
narrative largely blended w4th the analytical and the 
epigrammatic method neither the stanza nor blank-verse 
(had he ever mastered it) would have sufficed. But in 
Crabbe's last published volumes it was not only the 
metre that was to seem flat and monotonous in the 
X^resence of new proofs of the boundless capabilities of 
verse. The reader would not make much progress in 



IX.] VISITING IN LONDON 161 

these volumes without discovering that the depressing 
incidents of life, its disasters and distresses, were still 
Crabbe's prevailing theme. John Murray in the same 
season published Rogers's Human Life and Crabbe's 
■Tales of the Hall The publisher sent Crabbe a copy 
of the former, and he acknowledged it in a few lines 
as follows : — 

"I am anxious that Mr. Eogers should have all the success 
he can desire. I am more indebted to him than I could 
bear to think of, if I had not the highest esteem. It will 
give me great satisfaction to find him cordially admired. His 
is a favourable picture, and such he loves: so do I, but 
men's vices and folUes come into my mind, and spoil my 
drawing." 

Assuredly no more striking antithesis to Crabbe's 
habitual impressions of human life can be found than 
in the touching and often beautiful couplets of Rogers, 
a poet as neglected to-day as Crabbe. Rogers's picture 
of wedded happiness finds no parallel, I think, any- 
where in the pages of his brother-poet : — 

" Across the threshold led, 
And every tear kissed off as soon as shed, 
His house she enters, there to be a light 
Shining within, when all without is night ; 
A guardian angel o'er his life presiding, 
Doubling his pleasures, and his cares dividing I 
How oft her eyes read his ; her gentle mind 
To all his wishes, all his thoughts, inclined ; 
Still subject — ever on the watch to borrow 
Mirth of his mirth, and sorrow of his sorrow. 
The soul of music slumbers in the shell, 
Till waked to rapture by the master's spell ; 
And feeling hearts — touch them but rightly — pour 
A thousand melodies unheard before." 

M 



162 CRABBE [chap, ix.] 

It may be urged that Kogers exceeds in one direction 
as unjustifiably as Crabbe in the opposite. But there 
is room in poetry for both points of view, thougli the 
absolute — the Shakespearian — grasp of Human Life 
may be truer and more eternally convincing than 
either. 



CHAPTER X 



THE TALES OF THE HALL 



(1819) 

The Tales of the Hall were published by John Murray 
in June 1819, in two handsome octavo volumes, with 
every advantage of tyjje, paper, and margin. In a 
letter of Orabbe to Mrs. Leadbeater, in October 1817, 
he makes reference to these tales, already in prepara- 
tion. He tells his correspondent that " Remembrances " 
was the title for them proposed by his friends. We 
learn from another source that a second title had been 
suggested, "Forty Days — a Series of Tales told at 
Binning Hall.'' Finally Mr. Murray recommended 
Tales of the Hall, and this was adopted. 

In the same letter to Mrs. Leadbeater, Crabbe writes : 
" I know not how to describe the new, and probably 
(most probably) the last work I shall publish. Though 
a village is the scene of meeting between my two 
principal characters, and gives occasion to other 
characters and relations in general, yet I no more 
describe the manners of village inhabitants. My 
people are of superior classes, though not the most 
elevated ; and, with a few exceptions, are of educated 
and cultivated minds and habits." In making this 
change Crabbe was also aware that some kind of unity 
must be given to those new studies of human life. 

168 



161 CRABBE [chap. 

And lie found at least a semblance of this unity in ties 
of family or friendship uniting the tellers of them. 
Moreover Crabbe, who had a wide and even intimate 
knowledge of English poetry, was well acquainted with 
the Canterbury Tales, and he bethought him that he 
would devise a framework. And the plan he worked 
out was as follows : — 

" The Hall " under whose roof the stories and con- 
versations arise is a gentleman's house, apparently in 
the eastern counties, inhabited by the elder of two 
brothers, George and Richard. George, an elderly 
bachelor, who had made a sufficient fortune in business, 
has retired to this country seat, which stands upon the 
site of a humbler dwelling where George had been 
born and spent his earliest years. The old home of 
his youth had subsequently passed into the hands of a 
man of means, who had added to it, improved the sur- 
roundings, and turned it into a modern and elegant 
villa. It was again in the market when George was 
seeking a retreat for his old age, and he purchased it — 
glad, even under the altered conditions, to live again 
among the loved surroundings of his childhood. 

George has a half-brother, Eichard, much younger 
than himself. They are the children of the same 
mother who, some years after her first widowhood, had 
married an Irish gentleman, of mercurial habit, by 
whom she had this second child. George had already 
left home to earn his living, with the consequence that 
the two brothers had scarcely ever met until the 
occasion upon which the story opens. Eichard, after 
first trying the sea as a profession, had entered the 
army during the war with Napoleon; distinguished 
himself in the Peninsula; and finally returned to his 



X.] THE TALES OF THE HALL 165 

native country, covered with glory and enjoying 
a modest x^ension. He woos and wins the daughter 
of a country clergyman, marries, and finds a young 
family growing up around him. He is filled with a 
desire to resume friendly relations with his half-brother 
George, but is deterred from making the first advances. 
George, hearing of this through a common friend, 
cordially responds, and Richard is invited to spend a 
few weeks at Binning Hall. The two brothers, whose 
bringing up had been so different, and whose ideas 
and politics were far removed, nevertheless find their 
mutual companionship very pleasant, and every evening 
over their port wine relate their respective adventures 
and experiences, while George has also much to tell of his 
friends and neighbours around him. The clergyman of 
the parish, a former fellow of his college, often makes a 
third at these meetings ; and thus a sufficient variety of 
topic is insured. The tales that these three tell, with 
the conversations arising out of them, form the subject 
matter of these Tales of the Hall. Crabbe devised a 
very pleasant means of bringing the brother's visit to 
a close. When the time originally proposed for the 
younger brother's stay is nearing its end, the brothers 
prepare to part. At first, the younger is somewhat 
disconcerted that his elder brother seemed to take his 
departure so little to heart. But this display of 
indifference proves to be only an amiable ruse on the 
part of George. On occasion of a final ride together 
through the neighbouring country, George asks for 
his brother's opinion about a purchase he has recently 
made, of a pleasant house and garden adjoining his 
own property. It then turns out that the generous 
George has bought the place as a home for his brother, 



166 CRABBE [chap. 

who will in future act as George's agent or steward. 
On approaching and entering the house, Eichard finds 
his wife and children, who have been privately 
informed of the arrangement, already installed, and 
eagerly waiting to welcome husband and father to this 
new and delightful home. 

Throughout the development of this story with 
its incidental narratives, Crabbe has managed, as in 
previous poems, to make large use of his own personal 
experience. The Hall proves to be a modern gentle- 
man's residence constructed out of a humbler farm- 
house by additions and alterations in the building and 
its surroundings, which was precisely the fate which 
had befallen Mr. Tovell's old house which had come to 
the Crabbe family, and had been parted with by them 
to one of the Suffolk county families. "Moated 
Granges " were common in Norfolk and Suffolk. Mr. 
Tovell's house had had a moat, and this too had been a 
feature of George's paternal home : — 

" It was an ancient, venerable Hall, 
And once surrounded by a moat and wall ; 
A part was added by a squire of taste 
Who, while unvalued acres ran to waste. 
Made spacious rooms, whence he could look about, 
And mark improvements as they rose without ; 
He fill'd the moat, he took the wall away. 
He thinn'd the park and bade the view be gay." 

In this instance, the squire who had thus altered the 
property had been forced to sell it, and George was 
thus able to return to the old surroundings of his 
boyhood. In the third book. Boys at jScJwoI, George 
relates some of his recollections, which include the 
story of a school-fellow, who having some liking for art 



X.] THE TALES OF THE PI ALL 167 

but not much talent, finds his ambitions defeated, and 
dies of chagrin in consequence. This was in fact the 
true story of abrother of Crabbe's wife, Mr. James Elmy. 
Later, again, in the work the rector of the parish is 
described, and the portrait drawn is obviously that of 
Crabbe himself, as he appeared to his Dissenting 
parishioners at Muston : — 

" ' A moral teacher ! ' some, contemptuous, cried ; 
He smiled, but nothing of the fact denied, 
Nor, save by his fair life, to charge so strong replied. 
Still, though he bade them not on aught rely 
That was their own, but all their worth deny. 
They called his pure advice his cold morality. 

He either did not, or he would not see, 

That if he meant a favourite priest to be. 

He must not show, but learn of them, tlie way 

To truth — he must not dictate, but obey ; 

They wish'd him not to bring them further light, 

But to convince them that they now were right,' 

And to assert that justice will condemn 

All who presumed to disagree with them : 

In this he fail'd, and his the greater blame. 

For he persisted, void of fear or shame." 

There is a touch of bitterness in these lines that 
is unmistakably that of a personal grievance, even if 
the poet's son had not confirmed the inference in 
a foot-note. 

Book ly. is devoted to the Adventures of Hichard, 
which begin with his residence with his mother 
near a small seaport (evidently Aldeburgh) ; and 
here we once more read of the boy, George Crabbe, 
watching and remembering every aspect of the storms, 



168 CRABBE [chap. 

and making friends with the wives and children of the 
sailors and the smugglers : — 

" I loved to walk where none had walk'd before, 
About the rocks that ran along the shore ; 
Or far beyond the sight of men to stray, 
And take my pleasure when I lost my way ; 
Eor then 'twas mine to trace the hilly heath. 
And all the mossy moor that lies beneath : 
Here had I favourite stations, where I stood 
And heard the murmurs of the ocean-flood, 
With not a sound beside except when flew 
Aloft the lapwing, or the grey curlew, 
Who with wild notes my fancied power defied, 
And mock'd the dreams of solitary pride." 

And as Crabbe evidently resorts gladly to personal 
experiences to make out the material for his work, the 
same also holds with regard to the incidental tales. 
Crabbe refers in his Preface to two of these as not 
of his own invention, and his son, in the Notes, admits 
the same of others. One, as we have seen, happened 
in the Elmy family ; another was sent him by a friend 
in Wiltshire, to which county the story belonged ; 
while the last in the series, and perhaps the most 
painful of all, Poachers and Smugglers, was told to 
Crabbe by Sir Samuel Eomilly, whom he had met 
at Hampstead, only a ie^Y weeks before Eomilly's own 
tragic death. Probably other tales, not referred to 
by Crabbe or his son, were also encountered by the 
poet in his intercourse with his parishioners, or sub- 
mitted to him by his friends. We might infer this 
from the singular inequality, in interest and poetical 
opportunity, of the various plots of these stories. Some 
of them are assuredly not such as any poet would have 



X.] THE TALES OF THE HALL 169 

sat down and elaborated for himself, and it is strange 
how little sense Crabbe seems to have possessed as to 
which were worth treating, or conld even admit of 
artistic treatment at all. A striking instance is afforded 
by the strange and most nnpleasing history, entitled 
Lady Barbara : or, The Ghost. 

The story is as follows: A young and beautiful 
lady marries early a gentleman of good family Avho 
dies within a year of their marriage. In spite of many 
proposals she resolves to remain a widow ; and for the 
sake of congenial society and occupation, she finds a 
home in the family of a pious clergyman, where she 
devotes herself to his young children, and makes her- 
self useful in the parish. Her favourite among the 
children is a boy, George, still in the schoolroom. The 
boy grows apace ; goes to boarding-school and college ; 
and is on the point of entering the army, when he dis- 
covers that he is madly in love with the lady, still 
an inmate of the house, who had "mothered him" 
when a child. No ages are mentioned, but we may 
infer that the young man is then about two and 
twenty, and the lady something short of forty. The 
position is not unimaginable, though it may be un- 
common. The idea of marrying one who had been to 
her as a favourite child, seems to the widow in the first 
instance repulsive and almost criminal. But it turns 
out that there is another reason in the background for 
her not re-entering the marriage state, which she dis- 
closes to the ardent youth. It appears that the widow 
had once had a beloved brother who had died early. 
These two had been brought up by an infidel father, 
who had impressed on his children the absurdity of all 
such ideas as immortality. The children had often 



170 CllABBE [ciiAP. 

discussed and pondered over tliis subject together, and 
had made a compact that v/hichever of them died first 
shoukl, if possible, appear to the survivor, and thus 
solve the awful problem of a future life. The brother 
not long after died in foreign parts. Immediately after 
his death, before the sister heard the news, the brother's 
ghost appeared in a dream, or vision, to the sister, and 
warned her in solemn tones against ever marrying a 
second time. The spirit does not appear to have given 
any reasons, but his manner w^as so impressive and so 
unmistakable that the lady had thus far regarded it 
as an injunction never to be disobeyed. On hearing this 
remarkable story, the young man, George, argues im- 
patiently against the trustworthiness of dreams, and 
is hardly silenced by the widow showing him on her 
wrist the mark still remaining where the spirit had seized 
and pressed her hand. In fine, the impassioned suitor 
prevails over these superstitious terrors, as he reckons 
them, of the lady — and they become man and wife. 

The reader is here placed in a condition of great 
perplexity, and his curiosity becomes breathless. The 
sequel is melancholy indeed. After a few months' union, 
the young man, whose plausible eloquence had so moved 
the widow, tires of his wife, ill-treats her, and breaks 
her heart. The Psychical Society is avenged, and the 
ghost's word was worth at least '• a thousand pounds." 
It is difficult for us to take such a story seriously, but 
it must have interested Crabbe deeply, for he has 
expended upon it much of his finest power of analysis, 
and his most careful writing. As we have seen, the 
subject of dreams had always had a fascination for him, 
of a kind not unconnected perhaps with the opium- 
habit. The stor}^, however it was to be treated, was 



X.] THE TALES OF THE HALL 171 

unpromising ; but as the denouement was what it proved 
to be, the astonishing thing is that Crabbe should not 
have felt the dramatic impropriety of putting into the 
young man's mouth passages of an impressive, and 
almost Shakespearian, beauty such as are rare indeed 
in his poetry. The following lines are not indeed 
placed within inverted commas, but the pronoun " I " 
is retained, and they are apparently intended for some- 
thing passing in the young suitor's mind : — 

" ! tell me not of years, — can she be old ? 
Those eyes, those lips, can man unmoved behold ? 
Has time that bosom chilPd ? are cheeks so rosy cold ? 
No, she is young, or I her love t' engage 
Will grow discreet, and that will seem like age : 
But speak it not ; Death's equalising arm 
Levels not surer than Love's stronger charm, 
That bids all inequalities be gone, 
That laughs at rank, that mocks comparison. 
There is not young or old, if Love decrees ; 
He levels orders, he confounds degrees : 
There is not fair, or dark, or short, or tall, 
Or grave, or sprightly — Love reduces all ; 
He makes unite the pensive and the gay. 
Gives something here, takes something there away ; 
From each abundant good a portion takes, 
And for each want a compensation makes ; 
Then tell me not of years — Love, power divine, 
Takes, as he wills, from hers, and gives to mine." 

In these line lines it is no doubt Crabbe himself that 
speaks, and not the young lover, Avho was to turn out 
in the sequel an unparalleled " cad." But then, what 
becomes of dramatic consistency, and the imperative 
claims of art ? 

In the letter to Mrs. Leadbeater already cited Crabbe 



172 CRABBE [chap. 

writes as to his forthcoming collection of tales : " I do 
not know, on a general view, whether my tragic or 
lighter tales, etc., are most in number. Of those 
equally well executed the tragic will, I suppose, make 
the greater impression." Crabbe was right in this 
forecast. Whether more or less in number, the " tragic " 
tales far surpass the "lighter" in their effect on the 
reader, in the intensity of their gloom. Such stories 
as that of Lady Barbara, Delay has Danger, The Sisters, 
Ellen, Smugglers and Poachers, Richard's story of Rutli, 
and the elder brother's account of his own early attach- 
ment, with its miserable sequel — all these are of a 
poignant painfulness. Human crime, error, or selfish- 
ness working life-long misery to others — this is the 
theme to which Crabbe turns again and again, and on 
which he bestows a really marvellous power of an- 
alysis. There is never wanting, side by side with these, 
what Crabbe doubtless believed to be the compensating 
presence of much that is lovable in human character, 
patience, resignation, forgiveness. Bat the resultant 
effect, it must be confessed, is often the reverse of 
cheering. The fine lines of Wordsworth as to — 

" Sorrow that is not sorrow, but delight ; 
And miserable love, that is not pain 
To hear of, for the glory that redounds 
Therefrom to human kind, and what we are," 

fail to console us as we read these later stories of 
Crabbe. We part from too many of them not, on the 
whole, with a livelier faith in human nature. We are 
crushed by the exhibition of so much that is abnormally 
base and sordid. 

The Tales of the Hall are full of surprises even to 



X.] THE TALES OF THE HALL 173 

those familiar with Crabbe's earlier poems. He can 
still allow couplets to stand wbicli are perilously near 
to doggerel ; and, on the other hand, when his deepest 
interest in the fortunes of his characters is aroused, he 
rises at times to real eloquence, if never to poetry's 
supremest heights. Moreover, the poems contain 
passages of description which for truth to nature, 
touched by real imagination, are finer than anything 
he had yet achieved. The story entitled Delay has 
Danger contains the fine picture of an autumn land- 
scape seen through the eyes of the miserable lover — 
the picture which dwelt so firmly in the memory of 
Tennyson : — 

" That evening all in fond discourse was spent, 
Wlien the sad lover to his chamber went, 
To think on what had passed, to grieve, and to repent: 
Early he rose, and look'd with many a sigh 
On the red light that fiird the eastern sky : 
Oft had he stood before, alert and gay, 
To hail the glories of the new-born day ; 
But now dejected, languid, listless, low, 
He saw the wind upon the water blow, 
And the cold stream curl'd onward as the gale 
Erom the pine-hill blew harshly down the dale ; 
On the right side the youth a wood survey'd, 
With all its dark intensity of shade ; 
Where the rough wind alone was heard to move, 
In this, the pause of nature and of love, 
When now the young are rear'd, and when the old, 
Lost to the tie, grow negligent and cold — 
Ear to the left he saw the huts of men, 
Half hid in mist that hung upon the fen ; 
Before him swallows, gathering for the sea, 
Took their short flights, and twitter' d on the lea ; 
And near the bean-sheaf stood, the harvest done, 
And slowly blacken'd in the sickly sun ; 



174 CRABBE [chap. 

All these were sad in nature, or they took 
Sadness from him, the likeness of his look, 
And of his mind — he ponder'd for a while, 
Then met his Fanny with a borrow'd smile." 

The entire story, from which this is an extract, is 
finely told, and the fitness of the passage is beyond dis- 
pute. At other times the description is either so much 
above the level of the narrative, or below it, as to be 
almost startling. In the very first pages of Tales of the 
Hall, in the account of the elder brother's early retire- 
ment from business, occur the following musical lines: 

" He chose his native village, and the hill 
He climb'd a boy had its attraction still ; 
With that small brook beneath, where he would stand 
And stooping fill the hollow of his hand 
To quench th' impatient thirst — then stop awhile 
To see the sun upon the waters smile, 
In that sweet weariness, when, long denied. 
We drink and view the fountain that supplied 
The sparkling bliss — and feel, if not express, 
Our perfect ease in that sweet weariness." 

Yet it is only a hundred lines further on that, to 
indicate the elder brother's increasing interest in the 
graver concerns of human thought, Crabbe can write : — 

" He then proceeded, not so much intent. 
But still in earnest, and to church he went : 
Although they found some difference in their creed, 
He and his pastor cordially agreed ; 
Convinced that they who would the truth obtain 
By disputation, find their efforts vain ; 
The church he view'd as liberal minds will view, 
And there he fix'd his principles and pew." 

Among those surprises to which I have referred is 
the apparently recent development in the poet of a 



X.] THE TALES OF THE HALL 175 

lyrical gift, the like of which he had not exhibited 
before. Crabbe had already written two notable 
poems in stanzas, Sir Eustace Grey, and that other pain- 
ful but exceedingly powerful drama in monologue, 
The Hall of Justice. But since the appearance of his 
last volumes, Crabbe had formed some quite novel 
poetical friendships, and it would seem likely that 
association with Eogers, though he saw and felt that 
elegant poet's deficiencies as a painter of human life, 
had encouraged him to try an experiment in his friend's 
special vein. One of the most depressing stories in the 
series is that of the elder brother's ill-fated passion for 
a beautiful girl, to whom he had been the accidental 
means of rendering a vital service in rescuing her and 
a companion from the " rude uncivil kine " in a 
meadow. To the image of this girl, though he never 
set eyes on her again for many years, he had remained 
faithful. The next meeting, when at last it came, 
brought the most terrible of disillusions. Sent by his 
chief to transact certain business with a wealthy banker 
(" Clutterbuck & Co."), the young merchant calls at 
a villa where the banker at times resided, and finds 
that the object of his old love and his fondest dreams 
is there installed as the banker's mistress. She 
is greatly moved at the sight of the youthful lover of 
old days, who, with more chivalry than prudence, offers 
forgiveness if she will break off this degrading alliance. 
She cannot resolve to take the step. She has become 
used to luxury and continuous amusement, and she 
cannot face the return to a duller domesticity. Finally, 
however, she dies jDcnitent, and it is the contemplation 
of her life and death that works a life-long change in 
the ambitions and aims of the old lover. He wearies 



176 CRABBE [chap. 

of money-making, and retires to lead a country life, 
where he may be of some good to his neighbours, and 
turn to some worthy use the time that may be still 
allowed him. The story is told with real pathos and 
impressive force. But the picture is spoiled by the 
tasteless interpolation of a song which the unhappy 
girl sings to her lover, at the very moment apparently 
when she has resolved that she can never be his : — 

" My Damon was the first to wake 

The gentle flame that cannot die ; 
My Damon is the last to take 

The faithful bosom's softest sigh ; 
The life between is nothing worth, 

O ! cast it from thy thought away ; 
Think of the day that gave it birth, 

And this its sweet returning day. 

"Buried be all that has been done, 

Or say that nought is done amiss ; 
For who the dangerous path can shun 

In such bewildering world as this ? 
But love can every fault forgive. 

Or with a tender look reprove ; 
And now let nought in memory live, 

But that we meet, and that we love." 

The lines are pretty enough, and may be described 
as a blend of Tom Moore and Eogers. A similar lyric, 
in the story called The Sisters, might have come straight 
from the pen which has given us " Mine be a cot beside 
a hill," and is not so wholly irrelevant to its context 
as the one just cited. 

Since Crabbe's death in 1832, though he has never 
been without a small and loyal band of admirers, no 
single influence has probably had so much effect in 
reviving interest in his poetry as that of Edward 



X.] THE TALES OF THE HALL 177 

FitzGerald, the translator of Omar Khayyam. Fitz- 
Gerald was born and lived the greater part of his 
life in Suffolk, and Crabbe was a native of Aldeburgh, 
and lived in the neighbourhood till he was grown to 
manhood. This circumstance alone might not have 
specially interested FitzGerald in the poet, but for the 
fact that the temperament of the two men was some- 
what the same, and that both dwelt naturally on the 
depressing sides of human life. But there were other 
coincidences to create a strong tie between FitzGerald 
and the poet's family. When FitzGerald's father w^ent 
to live at Boulge Hall, near Woodbridge, in 1835, 
Crabbe's son George had recently been presented 
to the vicarage of the adjoining parish of Bredfield 
(FitzGerald's native village), which he continued to 
hold until his death in 1857. During these two 
and twenty years, FitzGerald and George Crabbe 
remained on the closest, terms of friendship, which 
was continued with George Crabbe's son (a third 
George), who become ultimately rector of Merton in 
Norfolk. It was at his house, it will be remembered, 
that FitzGerald died suddenly in the summer of 1883. 
Through this long association with the family Fitz- 
Gerald was gradually acquiring information concern- 
ing the poet, which even the son's Biography had not 
supplied. Readers of FitzGerald's delightful Letters 
will remember that there is no name more constantly 
referred to than that of Crabbe. Whether writing 
to Fanny Kemble, or Frederick Tennyson, or Lowell, 
he is constantly quoting him, and recommending him. 
During the thirty years that followed Crabbe's 
death his fame had been on the decline, and poets 
of different and greater gifts had taken his place. 



178 CRABBE [chap. 

FitzGerald had noted this fact with ever increasing 
regret, and longed to revive the taste for a poet of 
whose merits he had himself no doubt. He discerned 
moreover that even those who had read in their youth 
The Village and The Borough had been repelled by the 
length, and perhaps by the monotonous sadness, of the 
Tales of the Hall. It was for this reason apparently 
(and not because he assigned a higher place to the later 
poetry than to the earlier) that he was led, after some 
years of misgiving, to prepare a volume of selections 
from this latest work of Crabbe's which might have the 
effect of tempting the reader to master it as a whole. 
Owing to the length and uniformity of Crabbe's verse, 
what was ordinarily called an " anthology " was out of 
the question. FitzGerald was restricted to a single 
method. He found that readers were impatient of 
Crabbe's longueurs. It occurred to him that while 
making large omissions he might preserve the story in 
each case, by substituting brief prose abstracts of the 
portions omitted. This process he applied to the 
tales that pleased him most, leaving v/hat he consid- 
ered Crabbe's best passages untouched. As early as 
1876 he refers to the selection as already made, and he 
printed it for private circulation in 1879. Finally, in 
1882, he added a preface of his own, and published it 
with Quaritch in Piccadilly. 

In his preface FitzGerald claims for Crabbe's latest 
work that the net impression left by it upon the reader 
is less sombre and painful than that left by his earlier 
poems. '' It contains," he urges, " scarce anything of 
that brutal or sordid villainy of which one has more than 
enough in the poet's earlier work." Perhaps there is 
not so much of the " brutal or sordid," but then in Tlie 



X.] THE TALES OF THE HALL 179 

Parish Register or 21ie Borough, the reader is in a way 
prepared for that ingredient, because the personages 
are the lawless and neglected poor of a lonely seaport. 
It is because, when he moves no longer among these, 
he yet finds vice and misery quite as abundant in " a 
village with its tidy homestead, and well-to-do tenants, 
within easy reach of a thriving country-town," that a 
certain shock is given to the reader. He discovers that 
all the evil passions intrude (like pale Death) into the 
comfortable villa as impartially as into the hovels at 
Aldeburgh. But FitzGerald had found a sufficient 
alleviation of the gloom in the framework of the tales. 
The growing affection of the two brothers, as they come 
to know and understand each other better, is one of 
the consistently pleasant passages in Crabbe's writings. 
The concluding words of FitzGerald's preface, as the 
little volume is out of print and very scarce, I may be 
allowed to quote : — 

" Is Crabbe then, whatever shape he may take, worth 
making room for in our over-crowded heads and libraries ? 
If the verdict of such critics as Jeffrey and Wilson be set 
down to contemporary partiality or inferior ' culture,' there is 
Miss Austen, who is now so great an authority in the repre- 
sentation of genteel humanity, so unaccountably smitten with 
Crabbe in his worsted hose that she is said to have pleasantly 
declared he was the only man whom she would care to marry. 
If Sir Walter Scott and Byron are but untesthetic judges of the 
poet, there is Wordsworth who was sufficiently exclusive in 
admitting any to the sacred brotherhood in which he still 
reigns, and far too honest to make any exception out of 
compliment to any one on any occasion — he did nevertheless 
thus write to the poet's son and biographer in 1834 : ' Any 
testimony to the merit of your revered father's works, would, 
I feel, be superfluous, if not impertinent. They will last 
from their combined merits as poetry and truth, full as long 



180 • CRABBE [chap. 

as anything that has been expressed in verse since they first 
made their appearance ' — a period which, be it noted, includes 
all Wordsworth's own volumes except Yarroio Bevisited, The 
Prelude, and The Borderers. And Wordsworth's living suc- 
cessor to the laurel no less participates with him in his 
appreciation of their forgotten brother. Almost the last time 
I met hhn he was quoting from memory that fine passage in 
Belay has Danger, where the late autumn landscape seems to 
borrow from the conscience-stricken lover who gazes on it the 
gloom which it reflects upon him ; and in the course of further 
conversation on the subject Mr. Tennyson added, ' Crabbe has 
a world of his own ' ; by virtue of that original genius, I 
suppose, which is said to entitle and carry the possessor to what 
we call immortality." 

Besides the stories selected for abridgment in the 
volume there were passages, from tales not there 
included, which FitzGerald was never weary of citing 
in his letters, to show his friends how true a poet 
was lying neglected of men. One he specially loved 
is the description of an autumn day in TJie Maid^s 
Story : — 

"There was a day, ere yet the autumn closed 
When, ere her wintry wars, the earth reposed ; 
When from the yellow weed the feathery crown, 
Light as the curling smoke, fell slowly down ; 
When the wing'd insect settled in our sight, 
And waited wind to recommence her flight ; 
When the wide river was a silver sheet, 
And on the ocean slept th' unanchor'd fleet, 
When from our garden, as we looked above. 
There was no cloud, and nothing seemed to move." 

Another passage, also in Crabbe's sweeter vein, 
forms the conclusion of the whole poem. It is where 
the elder brother hands over to the younger the 



X.] THE TALES OF THE HALL 181 

country house that is to form the future home of his 
wife and children : — 

" It is thy wife's, and will thy children's be, 
Earth, wood, and water ! all for thine and thee. 

There wilt thou soon thy own Matilda view, 
She knows our deed, and she approves it too ; 
Before her all our views and plans were laid, 
And Jacques was there to explain or to persuade. 
Here on this lawn thy boys and girls shall run. 
And play their gambols when their tasks are done, 
Then, from that window shall their mother view 
The happy tribe, and smile at all they do ; 
While thou, more gravely, hiding thy delight 
Shalt cry, ' O ! childish ! ' and enjoy the sight." 

FitzGerald's selections are made with the skill and 
judgment we should expect from a critic of so line a 
taste, but it may be doubted whether any degree of 
skill could have quite atoned for one radical flaw in his 
method. He seems to have had his own misgivings 
as to whether he was not, by that method, giving up 
one real secret of Crabbe's power. After quoting Sir 
Leslie Stephen's most true remark that " with all its 
short- and long-comings Crabbe's better work leaves its 
mark on the reader's mind and memory as only the 
work of genius can, while so many a more splendid 
vision of the fancy slips away, leaving scarce a mark 
behind," FitzGerald adds : " If this abiding impres- 
sion result (as perhaps in the case of Eichardson or 
AVordsworth) from being, as it were, soaked in through 
the longer process by which the man's peculiar genius 
works, any abridgment, whether of omission or epit- 
ome, will diminish from the effect of the whole.'^ 
FitzGerald is unquestionably in sight of a truth here. 



182 CRABBE [chap. 

The parallel with Wordsworth is indeed not exact, for 
the best of Wordsworth's poetry neither requires nor 
admits of condensation. The Excursion might benefit by 
omission and compression, but not The Solitary Reaper, 
nor The Daffodils. But the example of Eichardson is 
fairly in point. Abridgments of Clarissa Harlowe have 
been attempted, but probably without any effect on 
the number of its readers. The power of Richardson's 
method does actually lie in the " soaking process " to 
which FitzGerald refers. Nor is it otherwise with 
Crabbe. The fascination which his readers find in him 
— readers not perhaps found in the ranks of those who 
prefer their poetry on " hand-made paper " — is really the 
result of the slow and patient dissection of motive and 
temptation, the workings of conscience, the gradual 
development of character. These processes are slow, 
and Crabbe's method of presenting them is slow, but 
he attains his end. A distinction has lately been 
drawn between " literary Poetry," and " Poetry which 
is Literature." Crabbe's is rarely indeed that of the 
former class. It cannot be denied that it has taken its 
place in the latter. 

The apology for Crabbe's leugthiness might almost 
be extended to the singular inequalities of his verse. 
FitzGerald joins all other critics in regretting his care- 
lessness, and indeed the charge can hardly be called 
harsh. A poet who habitually insists on producing 
thirty lines a day, whether or no the muse is willing, 
can hardly escape temptations to carelessness. Crabbe's 
friends and other contemporaries noted it, and ex- 
pressed surprise at the absence in Crabbe of the artistic 
conscience. Wordsworth spoke to him on the subject, 
and ventured to express regret that he did not take 



X.] THE TALES OF THE HALL 183 

more pains with the workmanship of his verse, and 
reports that Crabbe's only answer was " it does not 
matter.'^ Samuel Rogers had related to Wordsworth 
a similar experience. " Mr. Eogers once told me that 
he expressed his regret to Crabbe that he wrote in his 
later works so much less correctly than in his earlier. 
^ Yes/ replied he, ' but then I had a reputation to 
make ; now I can afford to relax.' " This is of course 
very sad, and, as has already been urged, Crabbe's 
earlier works had the advantage of much criticism, and 
even correction from his friends. But, however this 
may be, it may fairly be urged that in a " downright " 
painter of human life, with that passion for realism 
which Crabbe was one of the first to bring back into 
our literature, mere " polish " would have hindered, not 
helped, the effects he was bent on producing. It is 
difficult in polishing the heroic couplet not to produce 
the impression of seeking epigrammatic point. In 
Crabbe's strenuous and merciless analyses of human 
character his power would have been often weakened, 
had attention been diverted from the whole to the parts, 
and from the matter to the manner. The " finish " of 
Gray, Goldsmith, and Eogers suited exquisitely with 
their pensive musings on Human Life. It was other- 
wise with the stern presentment of such stories of 
human sin and misery as Edward Shores or Delay has 
Danger. 



CHAPTER XI 

LAST YEARS AT TROWBRIDGE 
(1819-1832) 

The last thirteen years of Crabbe's life were spent at 
Trowbridge, varied by occasional absences among his 
friends at Bath and in the neighbourhood, and by 
annual visits of greater length to the family of Samuel 
Hoare at Hampstead. Meantime his son John was 
resident with him at Trowbridge, and the parish and 
parishioners were not neglected. From Mrs. Hoare's 
house on Hampstead Heath it was not difficult to 
visit his literary friends in London ; and Wordsworth, 
Southey, and others, occasionally stayed with the 
family. But as early as 1820, Crabbe became subject 
to frequent severe attacks of neuralgia (then called tic 
douloureux), and this malady, together with the gradual 
approach of old age, made him less and less able to face 
the fatigue of London hospitalities. 

Notwithstanding his failing health, and not in- 
frequent absence from his parish — for he occasionally 
visited the Isle of Wight, Hastings, and other watering- 
places with his Hampstead friends — Crabbe was living 
down at Trowbridge much of the unpopularity with 
which he had started. The peoi)le were beginning 
to discover what sterling qualities of heart existed side 
by side with defects of tact and temper, and the lack 

184 



[CHAP. XI.] LAST YEARS AT TROWBRIDGE 185 

of sympathy with certain sides of evangelical teaching. 
His son tells us, and may be trusted, that his father's 
personal piety deepened in his declining years, an 
influence which could not be ineffectual. Children, 
moreover, were growing up in the family, and proved a 
new source of interest and happiness. Pucklechurch 
was not far away, and his son George's eldest girl, 
Caroline, as she approached her fourth birthday, began 
to receive from him the tenderest of letters. 

The most important incident in Crabbe's life during 
this period was his visit to Walter Scott in Edinburgh 
in the early autumn of 1822. In the spring of that 
year, Crabbe had for the first time met Scott in 
London, and Scott had obtained from him a promise 
that he would visit him in Scotland in the autumn. It 
so fell out that George the Fourth, Avho had been 
crowned in the previous year, and was paying a series 
of Coronation progresses through his dominions, had 
arranged to visit Edinburgh in the August of this year. 
Whether Crabbe deliberately chose the same period for 
his own visit, or stumbled on it accidentally, and Scott 
did not care to disappoint his proposed guest, is not 
made quite clear by Crabbe's biographer. Scott had 
to move with all his family to his house in Edinburgh 
for the great occasion, and he would no doubt have 
much preferred to receive Crabbe at Abbotsford. 
Moreover, it fell to Scott, as the most distinguished 
man of letters and archaeologist in Edinburgh, to or- 
ganise all the ceremonies and the festivities necessary 
for the King's reception. In Lockhart's phrase, Scott 
stage-managed the whole business. And it was on 
Scott's return from receiving the King on board the 
royal yacht on the 14th of August that he found 



186 CRABBE [chap. 

awaiting him in Castle Street, one who must have 
been an inconvenient guest. The incidents of this first 
meeting are so charmingly related by Lockhart that I 
cannot resist repeating them in his words, well known 
though they may be : — 

" On receiving the poet on the quarter-deck, his Majesty 
called for a bottle of Highland whisky, and having drunk his 
health in this national liquor, desired a glass to be filled for 
him. Sir Walter, after draining his own bumper, made a 
request that the king would condescend to bestow on him the 
glass out of which his Majesty had just drunk his health : and 
this being granted, the precious vessel was immediately 
wrapped up and carefully deposited in what he conceived to 
be the safest part of his dress. So he returned with it to 
Castle Street ; but — to say nothing at this moment of graver 
distractions — on reaching his house he found a guest estab- 
lished there of a sort rather different from the usual visitors 
of the time. The Poet Crabbe, to whom he had been intro- 
duced when last in London by Mr. Murray of Albemarle 
Street, after repeatedly promising to follow up the acquaint- 
ance by an excursion to the North, had at last arrived in the 
midst of these tumultuous preparations for the royal advent. 
Notwithstanding all such impediments, he found his quarters 
ready for him, and Scott entering, wet and hurried, embraced 
the venerable man with brotherly affection. The royal gift 
was forgotten — the ample skirt of the coat within which it had 
been packed, and which he had hitherto held cautiously in 
front of his person, slipped back to its more usual position — 
he sat down beside Crabbe, and the glass was crushed to 
atoms. His scream and gesture made his wife conclude that 
he had sat down on a pair of scissors, or the like : but very 
little harm had been done except the breaking of the glass, of 
which alone he had been thinking. This was a damage not to 
be repaired : as for the scratch that accompanied it, its scar 
was of no great consequence, as even when mounting the 
' cat-dath, or battle-garment ' of the Celtic Club, he adhered, 
like his hero, Waverley, to the treios.''^ 



XI.] LAST YEARS AT TROWBRIDGE 187 

What follows in Lockhart's pages is also too inter- 
esting, as regards Scott's visitor himself, to be omitted. 
The Highland clans, or what remained of them, were 
represented on the occasion, and added greatly to the 
pictnresqueness of the procession and other pageantry. 
And this is what occurred on the morning after the 
meeting of Scott and his guest : — 

"By six o'clock next morning Sir Walter, arrayed in the 
' Garb of old Gaul ' (which he had of the Campbell tartan, in 
memory of one of his great-grandmothers), was attending a 
muster of these gallant Celts in the Queen Street Gardens, 
where he had the honour of presenting them with a set of 
colours, and delivered a suitable exhortation, crowned with 
their rapturous applause. Some members of the Club, all of 
course in their full costume, were invited to breakfast with 
him. He had previously retired for a little to his library, and 
when he entered the parlour, Mr. Crabbe, dressed in the 
highest style of professional neatness and decorum, with 
buckles in his shoes, and whatever was then beJQtting an 
English clergyman of his years and station, was standing in 
the midst of half-a-dozen stalwart Highlanders, exchanging 
elaborate civilities with them in what was at' least meant to 
be French. He had come into the room shortly before, with- 
out having been warned about such company, and hearing the 
party conversing together in an unknown tongue, the polite 
old man had adopted, in his first salutation, what he con- 
sidered as the universal language. Some of the Celts, on their 
part, took him for some foreign Abb6 or Bishop, and were 
doing their best to explain to him that they were not the 
wild savages for which, from the startled glance he had thrown 
on their hirsute proportions, there seemed but too much reason 
to suspect he had taken them ; others, more perspicacious, 
gave in to the thing for the joke's sake ; and there was high 
fun when Scott dissolved the charm of their stammering, by 
grasping Crabbe with one hand, and the nearest of these 
figures with the other, and greeted the whole group with the 
same hearty good-morning.''^ 



188 CRABBE [chap. 

In spite, however, of banquets (at one of which 
Crabbe was present) and other constant calls upon his 
host's time and labour, the southern poet contrived to 
enjoy himself. He wandered into the oldest parts of 
Edinburgh, and Scott obtained for him the services of 
a friendly caddie to accompany him on some of these 
occasions lest the old parson should come to any harm. 
Lockhart, who was of the party in Castle Street, was 
very attentive to Scott's visitor. Crabbe had but few 
opportunities of seeing Scott alone. "They had," 
writes Lockhart, " but one quiet walk together, and it 
was to the ruins of St. Anthony's Chapel and Mushat's 
Cairn, which the deep impression made on Crabbe by 
The Heart of Midlothian had given him an earnest wish 
to see. I accompanied them ; and the hour so spent — 
in the course of which the fine old man gave us some 
most touching anecdotes of his early struggles — was 
a truly delightful contrast to the bustle and worry of 
miscellaneous society which consumed so many of his 
few hours in Scotland. Scott's family were more 
fortunate than himself in this respect. They had from 
infancy been taught to reverence Crabbe's genius, and 
they now saw enough of him to make them think of 
him ever afterwards with tender affection." 

Yet one more trait of Scott's interest in his guest 
should not be omitted. The strain upon Scott's 
strength of the King's visit was made more severe by 
the death during that fortnight of Scott's old and dear 
friend, William Erskine, only a few months before 
elevated to the bench with the title of Lord Kinedder. 
Erskine had been irrecoverably wounded by the circu- 
lation of a cruel and unfounded slander upon his moral 
character. It so preyed on his mind that its effect was, 



XI.] LAST YEARS AT TROWBRIDGE 189 

in Scott's words, to " torture to death one of the most 
soft-hearted and sensitive of God's creatures." On the 
very day of the King's arrival he died, after high fever 
and delirium had set in, and his funeral, which Scott 
attended, followed in due course. " I am not aware," 
says Lockhart, " that I ever saw Scott in such a state 
of dejection as he was when I accompanied him and 
his friend Mr. Thomas Thomson from Edinburgh to 
Queensferry in attendance upon Lord Kinedder's 
funeral. Yet that was one of the noisiest days of the 
royal festival, and he had to plunge into some scene of 
high gaiety the moment after we returned. As we 
halted in Castle Street, Mr. Crabbe's mild, thoughtful 
face appeared at the window, and Scott said, on leaving 
me, ^Kow for what our old friend there puts down as 
the crowning curse of his poor player in The Borough : — 

' " To hide in rant the heart-ache of the night." ' " 

There is pathos in the recollection that just ten years 
later when Scott lay in his study at Abbotsf ord — the 
strength of that noble mind slowly ebbing away — the 
very passage in Tlie Borough just quoted was one of 
those he asked to have read to him. It is the graphic 
and touching account in Letter xii. of the *' Strolling 
Players," and as the description of their struggles and 
their squalor fell afresh upon his ear, his own excur- 
sions into matters theatrical recurred to him, and 
he murmured smiling, " Ah ! Terry won't like that ! 
Terry won't like that ! ! " 

The same year Crabbe was invited to spend Christ- 
mas at his old home, Belvoir Castle, but felt unable 
to face the fatigue in wintry weather. Meantime, 
among other occupations at home, he was finding 



190 CRABBE [chap. 

time to write verse copiously. Twenty-one manuscript 
volumes were left behind him at his death. He 
seems to have said little about it at home, for his 
son tells us that in the last year of his father's life 
he learned for tlie first time that another volume of 
tales was all but ready for the press. " There are in 
my recess at home," he writes to George, '' where they 
have been long undisturbed, another series of such 
stories, in number and quantity sufficient for another 
octavo volume ; and as I suppose they are much like 
the former in execution, and sufficiently different in 
events and characters, they may hereafter, in peaceable 
times, be worth something to you." A selection from 
these formed the Posthumous Poems, first given to the 
world in the edition of 1834. The Tales of the Hall, it 
may be supposed, had not quite justified the publisher's 
expectations. John Murrp.y had sought to revive 
interest in the whole bulk of Crabbe's poetry, of which 
he now possessed the copyright, by commissioning 
Richard Westall, R.A., to produce a series of illustra- 
tions of the poems, thirty-one in number, engravings of 
which were sold in sets at two guineas. The original 
drawings, in delicate water-colour, in the present Mr. 
John Murray's possession, are sufficiently grim. The 
engravings, lacking the relief of colour, are even more 
so, and a rapid survey of the entire series amply shows 
how largely in Crabbe's subjects balks the element of 
human misery. Crabbe was much flattered by this 
new tribute to his reputation, and dwells on it in one 
of his letters to Mrs. Leadbeater. 

A letter written from Mrs. Hoare's house at Hamp- 
stead in June 1825 presents an agreeable picture of 
his holiday enjoyments : — 



XI.] LAST YEARS AT TROWBRIDGE 191 

" My time passes I cannot tell how pleasantly when the 
pain leaves me. To-day I read one of my long stories to my 
friends and Mrs. Joanna Baillie and her sister. It was a task ; 
but they encouraged me, and were, or seemed, gratified. I 
rhyme at Hampstead with a great deal of facility, for nothing 
interrupts me but kind calls to something pleasant ; and 
though all this makes parting painful, it will, I hope, make 
me resolute to enter upon mj duties diligently when I return. 
I am too much indulged. Except a return of pain, and that 
not severe, I have good health ; and if my walks are not so 
long, they are more frequent. I have seen many things and 
many people ; have seen Mr. Southey and Mr. Wordsworth ; 
have been some days with Mv. Rogers, and at last have been 
at the Athenseum, and purpose to visit the Royal Institution. 
I have been to Richmond in a steamboat ; seen also the 
picture-galleries and soine other exhibitions ; but I passed one 
Sunday in London with discontent, doing no duty myself, nor 
listening to another ; and I hope my uneasiness proceeded not 
merely from breaking a habit. We had a dinner social and 
pleasant, if the hours before it had been rightly spent ; but I 
would not willingly pass another Sunday in the same manner. 
I have my home with my friends here (Mrs. Hoare's), and 
exchange it with reluctance for the Hummuras occasionally. 
Such is the state of the garden here, in which I walk and read, 
that, in a morning like this, the smell of the flowers is 
fragrant beyond anything I ever perceived before. It is 
what I can suppose may be in Persia or other oriental 
countries — a Raradisical sweetness. I am told that I or my 
verses, or perhaps both, have abuse in a book of Mr. Colburn's 
pubHshing, called The Spirit of the Times. I believe I felt 
something indignant; but my engraved seal dropped out of 
the socket and was lost, and I perceived this moved me much 
more than the Spirit of Mr. Hazlitt." 

The reference is, of course, to Hazlitt's Sjyirit of 
the Age, then lately published. In reviewing the 
poetry of his da}^ Hazlitt lias a chapter devoted to 
Campbell and Crabbe. The criticism on the latter is 



192 CRABBE [chap. 

little more than a greatly overdrawn picture of 
Crabbe's choice of vice and misery for his subjects, 
and ignores entirely any other side of his genius, 
ending with the remark that he would long be "a 
thorn in the side of English poetry," Crabbe was 
wise in not attaching too much importance to Haz- 
litt's attack. 

Joanna Baillie and her sister Agnes, mentioned in 
the letter just cited, saw much of Crabbe during his 
visits to Hampstead. A letter from Joanna to the 
younger George speaks, as do all his friends, of his 
growing kindliness and courtesy, but notes how often, 
in the matter of judging his fellow-creatures, his head 
and his heart Avere in antagonism. While at times 
Joanna was surprised and provoked by the charitable 
allowances the old parson made for the unworthy, at 
other times she noted also that she would hear him, 
when acts of others were the subject of praise, suggest- 
ing, " in a low voice as to himself," the possible mixture 
of less generous motives. The analytical method was 
clearly dominant in Crabbe always, and not merely 
when he wrote his poetry, and is itself the clue to 
much in his treatment of human nature. 

Of Crabbe's simplicity and unworldliness in other 
matters Miss Baillie furnishes an amusing instance. 
She writes: — 

"While he was staymg with Mrs. Hoare a few years since 
I sent him one day the present of a black-cock, and a message 
with it that Mr. Crabbe should look at the bird before it was 
delivered to the cook, or something to that purpose. He 
looked at the bird as desired, and then went to Mrs. Hoare in 
some perplexity to ask whether he ought not to have it 
stuffed, instead of eating it. She could not, in her own house, 



XI.] LAST YEARS AT TROWBRIDGE 193 

tell him that it was simply intended for the larder, and he 
was at the trouble and expense of having it stuffed, lest I 
should think proper respect had not been put upon my 
present." 

Altogether the picture presented in these last years 
of Crabbe's personality is that of a pious and benevolent 
old man, endearing himself to old and new friends, and 
with manners somewhat formal and overdone, repre- 
senting perhaps what in his humbler Aldeburgh days 
he had imagined to be those of the upper circles, rather 
than what he had found them to be in his prosperous 
later days in London. 

In the autumn of 1831 he was visiting his faithful 
and devoted friends, the Samuel Hoares, at their resi- 
dence in Clifton. The house was apparently in Princes 
Buildings, or in the Paragon, for the poet describes 
accurately the scene that meets the eye from the back 
windows of those pleasant streets : — 

"I have to thank my friends for one of the most beautiful 
as well as comfortable rooms you covild desire. I look from 
my window upon the Avon and its wooded and rocky bounds 
— the trees yet green. A vessel is sailing down, and here comes 
a steamer (Irish I suppose). I have in view the end of the cliff 
to the right, and on my left a wide and varied prospect over 
Bristol, as far as the eye can reach, and at present the novelty 
makes it very interesting. ' Clifton was always a favourite 
place with me, I have more strength and more spirits since 
my arrival at this place, and do not despair of giving a good 
account of my excursion on my return." 

It is noteworthy that Crabbe, who as a young man 
witnessed the Lord George Gordon Eiots of 1780, 
should, fifty years later, have been in Bristol during 



194 CRABBE [chap. 

the disgraceful Reform Bill Rising of 1831, which, 
through the cowardice or connivance of the govern- 
ment of the day, went on unchecked to work such 
disastrous results to life and property. On October 
the 26th he writes to his son : — 

"I have been with Mrs. Hoare at Bristol, where all appears 
still. Should anything arise to alarm, j^ou may rely upon our 
care to avoid danger. Sir Charles Wetherall, to be sure, is 
not popular, nor is the Bishop, but I trust that both will be 
safe from violence — abuse they will not mind. The Bishop 
seems a good-humoured man, and, except by the populace, is 
greatly admired." 

A few days later, however, he has to record that his 
views of the situation were not to be fulfilled. He 
writes : — 

" Bristol, I suppose, never in the most turbulent times of 
old, witnessed such outrage. Queen's Square is but half 
standing ; half in a smoking ruin. As you may be apprehen- 
sive for my safety, it is right to let you know that my friends 
and I are undisturbed, except by our fears for the progress of 
this mob-government, which is already somewhat broken into 
parties, who wander stupidly about, or sleep wherever they 
fall wearied with their work and their indulgence. The 
military are now in considerable force, and many men are 
sworn in as constables ; many volunteers are met in Clifton 
Churchyard, with white round one arm to distinguish them, 
some with guns and the rest with bludgeons. The Mayor's 
house has been destroyed ; the Bishop's palace plundered, 
but whether burned or not I do not know. This morning a 
party of soldiers attacked the crowd in the square ; some lives 
were lost, and the mob dispersed, whether to meet again is 
doubtful. It has been a dreadful time, but we may reasonably 
hope it is now over. People are frightened certainly, and no 
wonder, for it is evident these poor wretches would plunder 
to the extent of their power. Attempts were made to burn 



XI.] LAST YEARS AT TROWBRIDGE 195 

the Cathedral, hut failed. Many lives were lost. To attempt 
any other subject now would be fruitless. We can think, 
speak, and write only of our fears, hopes, and troubles. I 
would have gone to Bristol to-day, but Mrs. Hoare was 
unwilling that I should. She thought, and perhaps rightly, 
that clergymen were marked objects. I therefore only went 
half-way, and of course could learn but little. All now is 
quiet and well." 

In the former of these last quoted letters Crabbe 
refers sadly to the pain of parting from his old Hamp- 
stead friends, — a parting which he felt might well be 
the last. His anticipation was to be fulfilled. He left 
Chfton in November, and went direct to his son 
George, at Pucklechurch. He was able to preach twice 
for his son, who congratulated the old man on the 
power of his voice, and other encouraging signs of 
vigour. " I will venture a good sum, sir," he said, 
" that you will be assisting me ten years hence." " Ten 
weeks " was Crabbe' s answer, and the implied predic- 
tion was fulfilled almost to the day. After a fortnight 
at Pucklechurch, Crabbe returned to his own home 
at Trowbridge. Early in January he reported himself 
as more and more subject to drowsiness, which he 
accepted as sign of increasing weakness. Later in 
the month he was prostrated by a severe cold. Otlier 
complications supervened, audit soon became apparent 
that he could not rally. After a few days of much 
suffering, and pious resignation, he passed away on the 
third of February 1832, with his two sons and his 
faithful nurse by his side. The death of the rector 
was followed by every token of general affection and 
esteem. The past asperities of religious and political 
controversy had long ceased, and it was felt that the 



196 CRABBE [chap. 

whole parish had lost a devout teacher and a generous 
friend. All he had written in The Borough and else- 
where as to the eccentricities of certain forms of dissent 
was forgotten, and all the Nonconformist ministers of 
the place and neighbourhood followed him to the grave. 
A committee was speedily formed to erect a monument 
over his grave in the chancel. The sculptor chosen 
produced a group of a type then common : "A figure 
representing the dying poet, casting his eyes on the 
sacred volume ; two celestial beings, one looking on as 
if awaiting his departure." Underneath was inscribed, 
after the usual words telling his age, and period of his 
work at Trowbridge, the following not exaggerated 
tribute : — 

" Born in humble life, he made himself what he was. 

By the force of his genius, 

He broke through the obscurity of his birth 

Yet never ceased to feel for the 

Less fortunate ; 

Entering (as his work can testify) into 

The sorrows and deprivations 

Of the poorest of his parishioners ; 

And so discharging the duties of his station as a 

Minister and a magistrate, 

As to acquire the respect and esteem 

Of all his neighbours. 

As a writer, he is well described by a great 

Contemporary, as 
'Nature's sternest painter yet her best.' " 

A fresh edition of Crabbe's complete works was at 
once arranged for by John Murray, to be edited by 
George Crabbe, the son, who was also to furnish the 
prefatory memoir. The edition appeared in 1834, in 



XI.] LAST YEARS AT TROWBRIDGE 197 

eight volumes. An engraving by Finden from Phillips's 
portrait of the poet was prefixed to the last volume, 
and each volume contained frontispieces and vignettes 
from drawings by Clarkson Stanfield of scenery or 
buildings connected with Crabbe's various residences in 
Suffolk and the Vale of Belvoir. The volumes were 
ably edited ; the editor's notes, together with quota- 
tions from Crabbe's earliest critics in the Edinburgh 
and Quarterly Reviews^ were interesting and informing, 
and the illustrations happily chosen. But it is not so 
easy to acquiesce in an editorial decision on a more 
important matter. The eighth volume is occupied by 
a selection from the tales left in manuscript by Crabbe, 
to which reference has already been made. The son, 
whose criticisms of his father are generally sound, 
evidently had misgivings concerning these from the 
first. In a prefatory note to this volume, the brothers 
(writing as executors) confess these misgivings. They 
were startled on reading the new poems in print at 
the manifest need of revision and correction before 
they could be given to the world. They delicately 
hint that the meaning is often obscure, and the 
" images left imperfect." This criticism is absolutely 
just, but unfortunately some less well-judging persons 
though '' of the highest eminence in literature " had 
advised the contrary. So " second thoughts prevailed," 
instead of those "third thoughts which are a riper 
first," and the tales, or a selection from them, were 
printed. They have certainly not added to Crabbe's 
reputation. There are occasional touches of his old 
and best pathos, as in the story of Eachel, and in The 
Ancient Mansion there are brief descriptions of rural 
nature under the varying aspects of the seasons, which 



198 CRABBE [chap. 

exhibit all Crabbe's old and close observation of detail, 
sucli as : — 

' ' And then the wintry winds begin to blow, 
Then fall the flaky stars of gathering snow, 
When on the thorn the ripening sloe, yet blue, 
Takes the bright varnish of the morning dew ; 
The aged moss grows brittle on the pale, 
The dry boughs splinter in the windy gale." 

But there is much in these last tales that is trivial and 
tedious, and it must be said that their xDublication has 
chiefly served to deter many readers from the pursuit 
of v^^hat is best and most rewardful in the study of 
Crabbe. To what extent the new edition served to 
revive any flagging interest in the poet cannot perhaps 
be estimated. The edition must have been large, for 
during many years past no book of the kind has been 
more prominent in second-hand catalogues. As we 
have seen, the popularity of Crabbe was already on 
the wane, and the appearance of the two volumes of 
Tennyson, in 1842, must further have served to divert 
attention from poetry so widely different. Workman- 
ship so casual and imperfect as Crabbe's had now to 
contend with such consummate art and diction as that 
of The Miller's Daughter and Dora. 

As has been more than once remarked, these stories 
belong to the category of fiction as well as of poetry, 
and the duration of their power to attract was affected 
not only by the appearance of greater poets, but of 
prose story-tellers with equal knowledge of the human 
heart, and with other gifts to which Crabbe could 
make no claim. His knowledge and observation of 
human nature were not perhaps inferior to Jane 
Austen's, but he could never have matched her in 



XI.] LAST YEARS AT TROWBRIDGE 199 

prose fiction. He certainly was not deficient in 
humour, but it was not his dominant gift, as it was 
hers. Again, his knowledge of the life and social ways 
of the class to which he nominally belonged, does not 
seem to have been intimate. Crabbe could not have 
written prose fiction with any approximation to the 
manners of real life. His characters would have 
certainly thou'ed and thee'ed one another as they do in 
his verse, and a clergyman would always have been 
addressed as " Keverend Sir ! " 

Surely, it will be argued, all this is sufficient to 
account for the entire disappearance of Crabbe from 
the list of poets whom every educated lover of poetry 
is expected to appreciate. Yet the fact remains, as 
FitzGerald quotes from Sir Leslie Stephen, that " with 
all its short- and long-comings, Crabbe's better work 
leaves its mark on the reader's mind and memory as 
only the work of genius can," and almost all English 
poets and critics of mark, during his time and after it, 
have agreed in recognising the same fact. We know 
what was thought of him by Walter Scott, Words- 
worth, Byron, and Tennyson. Critics differing as 
widely in other matters as Macaulay, John Henry 
Newman, Mr. Swinburne, and Dr. Gore, have found 
in Crabbe an insight into the springs of character, 
and a tragic power of dealing with them, of a 
rare kind. No doubt Crabbe demands something 
of his readers. He asks from them a corresponding 
interest in human nature. He asks for a kindred 
habit of observation, and a kindred patience. The 
present generation of poetry-readers cares mainly for 
style. While this remains the habit of the town, 
Crabbe will have to wait for any popular revival. 



200 CRABBE [chap. 

But he is not so dead as the world thinks. He has his 
constant readers still, but they talk little of their poet. 
" They give Heaven thanks, and make no boast of 
it." These are they to whom the "unruly wills and 
affections '^ of their kind are eternally interesting, even 
when studied through the medium of a uniform and 
monotonous metre. 

A Trowbridge friend wrote to Crabbe's son, after his 
father's death, " When I called on him, soon after his 
arrival, I remarked that his house and garden were 
pleasant and secluded: he replied that he preferred 
walking in the streets, and observing the faces of the 
passers-by, to the finest natural scenes." There is a 
poignant line in Maud, where the distracted lover 
dwells on " the faces that one meets." It was not by 
the " sweet records, promises as sweet," that these two 
observers of life were impressed, but rather by vicious 
records and hopeless outlooks. It was such counte- 
nances that Crabbe looked for, and speculated on, for 
in such he found food for that pity and terror he most 
loved to awaken. The starting-point of Crabbe's desire 
to portray village-life truly was a certain indignation 
he felt at the then still-surviving conventions of the 
Pastoral Poets. We have lately watched, in the litera- 
ture of our own day, a somewhat similar reaction 
against sentimental pictures of country-life. The 
feebler members of a family of novelists, which some 
one wittily labelled as the '^kail-yard school," so 
irritated a young Scottish journalist, the late Mr. 
George Douglas, that he resolved to provide what 
he conceived might be a useful corrective for the 
public mind. To counteract the half-truths of the 
opposite school, he wrote a tale of singular power and 



XI.] LAST YEARS AT TROWBRIDGE 201 

promise, the House ivith the Green Shutters. Like all 
reactions, it erred in the violence of its colouring. If 
intended as a true picture of the normal state of a 
small Scottish provincial town and its society, it may- 
have been as false in its own direction as the kail- 
yarders had been in theirs. But for Mr. Douglas's 
untimely death — a real loss to literature — he would 
doubtless have shown in future fictions that the 
pendulum had ceased to swing, and would have given 
us more artistic, because completer, pictures of human 
life. With Crabbe the force of his primal bias never 
ceased to act until his life's end. The leaven of pro- 
test against the sentimentalists never quite worked 
itself out in him, although, no doubt, in some of 
the later tales and portrayals of character, the sun 
was oftener allowed to shine out from behind the 
clouds. 

We must not forget this when we are inclined to 
accept without question Byron's famous eulogium. 
A poet is not the '' best " painter of Nature, merely 
because he chooses one aspect of human character and 
human fortunes rather than another. If he must not 
conceal the sterner side, equally is he bound to remem- 
ber the sunnier and more serene. If a poet is to deal 
justly with the life of the rich or poor, he must take 
into fullest account, and give equal prominence to, the 
homes where happiness abides. He must remember 
that though there is a skeleton in every cupboard, it 
must not be dragged out for a purpose, nor treated 
as if it were the sole inhabitant. He must deal with 
the happinesses of life and not only with its miseries ; 
with its harmonies and not only its dislocations. He 
must remember the thousand homes in which is to 



202 CRABBE [chap. 

be found the quiet and faithful discharge of duty, 
inspired at once and illumined by the family affections, 
and not forget that in such as these the strength of a 
country lies. Crabbe is often spoken of as our first 
great realist in the poetry and fiction of the last 
century, and the word is often used as if it meant 
chiefly plain-speaking as to the sordid aspects of life. 
But he is the truest realist who does not suppress any 
side of that which may be seen, if looked for. Although 
Murillo threw into fullest relief the grimy feet of his 
beggar-boys which so offended Mr. Kuskin, still what 
eternally attracts us to his canvas is not the soiled feet 
but the *^ sweet boy faces" that ''laugh amid the Seville 
grapes." It was because Crabbe too often laid greater 
stress on the ugliness than on the beauty of things, 
that he fails to that extent to be the full and adequate 
painter and poet of humble life. 

He was a dispeller of many illusions. He could not 
give us the joy that Goldsmith, Cowper, and William 
Barnes have given, but he discharged a function no 
less valuable than theirs, and with an individuality 
that has given him a high and enduring place in the 
poetry of the nineteenth century. 

There can be no question that within the last twenty 
or thirty years there has been a marked revival of 
interest in the poetry of Crabbe. To the influence of 
Edward FitzGerald's fascinating personality this revival 
may be partly, but is not wholly, due. It may be of 
the nature of a reaction against certain canons of taste 
too long blindly followed. It may be that, like the 
Queen in Hamlet, we are beginning to crave for " more 
matter and less art " ; or that, like the Lady of Shalott, 
we are growing " half-sick of shadows," and long for 



XI.] LAST YEARS AT TROWBRIDGE 203 

a closer touch with the real joys and sorrows of common 
people. Whatever be the cause, there can be no reason 
to regret the fact, or to doubt that in these days of 
" art for art's sake," the influence of Crabbe's verse is 
at once of a bracing and a sobering kind. 



INDEX 



Aa7'on the Gipsy, 90. 
Addison, 103. 

Adventures of Richard, The, 167. 
Aldeburgh, fs-lT, 40 seq., 59, 60, 

64, 109, 131, 149, 167. 
Allegro (Milton), 47. 
Allington (Lincolnshire) , 64. 
Ancient Mansion, The, 197. 
Annals of the Parish, The (Gait), 

103. 
Annual Register, The, 54, 62, 104. 
Austen, Jane, 137, 179, 198. 
Autobiography, Crabhe's, 38. 

B 

Baillie, Agnes, 191, 192. 

Joanna, 191, 192. 

Barnes, William, 202. 
Barrie, J. M., 145. 
Barton, Bernard, 7. 
Basket-woman, The (Edgeworth), 

103. 
Bath, 153, 154, 184. 
Beccles, 13, 65, 131. 
Belvoir Castle, 41 seq., 55, 57, 64, 

65. 
Biography, Crabbe's, 34, 35, 43, 

53, 61, 64, 69, 71, 74, 75, 78, 79, 

91, 131, 148, 151, 152, 154, 158. 
"Blaney," 120. 
Borough, The, 6, 59, 75, 78, 90, 94, 

107, 108-127, 147, 159, 178, 179, 

189. 



Bos well, 46. 

Bowles, William Lisle, 153, 154. 

Boys at School, 166. 

Bristol, 193, 194. 

Bunbury, Sir Henry, 35, 36. 

Burke, 25-32, 34-54, 63, 93, 108, 

157, 158. 
Burns, 23, 24, 47, 89. 
Butler, Joseph, 68. 
Byron, 3, 14, 106, 139, 159, 179, 

199, 201. 



Campbell, Thomas, 154, 157, 191. 
Candidate, The, 22-25. 
Canterbury Tales, The (Chaucer), 

125, 164. 
Castle Rackj'ent (Edgeworth), 103. 
Celtic Club, 186. 
Chatterton, 16, 24. 
Chaucer, 51, 124. 
Childe Harold (Byron), 10(3, 160. 
Church, English, 53. 
Churchill (poet), 24, 137. 
Clarissa Harloive (Richardson), 

182. 
"Clelia," 120. 
Clergy, non-residence of, 67, 77; 

sketches of, 52, 112, 113, 114. 
Clifton, 193, 195. 
Coleridge, 3, 88, 89, 132, 153. 
Confessions of an Opium Eater 

(DeQuincey),84. 
Confidant, The, 145. 



205 



206 



CRABBE 



Courthope, Mr., 157. 

Cowley, 6. 

Cowper, 24, 47, 49, 202. 

Crabbe, George, birth and family- 
history of ,5 ; early literary bent, 
6 ; school days, 5-6 ; apprenticed 
to a surgeon, G; life at Wood- 
bridge, 7 ; falls in love, 8 ; first 
efforts in verse, 9-11 ; practises 
as a surgeon, 12; dangerous ill- 
ness, 13; engagement to Miss 
Elmy, 13; seeks his fortune in 
London, 16; poverty in London, 
18-33; keeps a diary, 18; un- 
successful attempts to sell his 
poems, 20 ; appeals to Edmund 
Burke, 28; Burke's help and 
patronage, 28; invited to Burke's 
country seat, 30, 38; publishes 
The Library, 31, 32 ; friendship 
with Burke, 34-54 ; second letter 
to Burke, 35; meetings with 
prominent men, 38 ; takes Holy 
Orders, 39-40 ; returns to Alde- 
burgh as curate, 40; coldly re- 
ceived by his fellow-townsmen, 
41 ; becomes domestic chaplain 
to the Duke of Rutland, 41 ; life 
at Belvoir Castle, 41 seq., 57, 
60; The Village, 47-53; receives 
LL.B. degree, 56; presented to 
two livings, 56; marriage, 57; 
curate of Stathern, 60; his 
children, 60, 65, 73 ; village tra- 
ditions concerning him , 61 ; The 
Neivspaper, 62 ; life at Stathern, 
63; moves to Muston, 64; re- 
visits his native place, 65 ; goes 
to Parham, HQ, 71 ; lives at Great 
Glemham Hall, 73; moves to 
Rendham, 77 ; ill-health, 78, 79 ; 
use of opium, 79, 80, 84, 85, 88; 
returns to Muston, 90, 91; pub- 
lishes a new volume of poems, 
92 ; The Parish Register, 92-107; 
his great popularity, 103, 122; 
friendship with Sir Walter Scott, 



104, 105; The Borough, 108-127; 
Tales, 128-145 ; visit to London, 
147 ; returns to Muston, 147 ; 
death of his wife, 147 ; serious 
illness, 148; rector of Trow- 
bridge, 148, 150 ; departure from 
Muston, 148 ; intercourse with 
literary men in London, 154, 
161 ; a member of the " Literary 
Society," 158; receives £3000 
from John Murray, 159; returns 
to Trowbridge, 159 ; Tales of the 
Hall, 163; visits Scott in Edin- 
burgh, 185 seq. ; Posthumous 
Poems, 190, 197, 198; last years 
at Trowbridge, 193; ilhiess and 
death, 195 ; his religious temper- 
ament, 15, 40, 185 ; rusticity and 
lack of polish, 42, 56; indiffer- 
ence to art, 69; want of tact, 
69; love of female society, 151, 
152, 153, 156, 157 ; acquaintance 
and sympathy with the poor, 3, 
10, 15, 50, 51, 52, 67, 121, 155; 
his preaching, 67 ; inequality of 
his work, 1, 173, 174, 182, 198; 
influence of preceding poets, 2, 
6, 95, 97, 99, 104, 125 ; his reputa- 
tion at its height, 3, 159; know- 
ledge of botany, 14, 39, 50, 61, 
66 ; his descriptions of nature, 
14, 15, 50, 118, 132, 172; first 
great realist in verse, 54, 201, 
202; fondness for verbal an- 
tithesis, 99, 115 ; his epigrams, 
99; dQiQctiYQ technique, 100; his 
influence on subsequent novel- 
ists, 103, 104; parodies of his 
style, 115, 116 ; his sense of hu- 
mour, 117, 118, 142, 199; defects 
of his poetry, 125 ; his retentive 
memory, 108; his characters 
drawn from life, 126 ; his treat- 
ment of peasant life, 133 ; power 
of analysing character, 138, 139, 
182, 183, 192; choice of sordid 
and gloomy subjects, 161, 172, 



INDEX 



207 



178, 190, 192, 202; his lyric 
verses, 175-176; Edward Fitz- 
Gerald's great admiration of his 
poetry, 176 ; contemporary and 
other estimates of his work, 179, 
180, 199; revival of interest in 
him, 176, 202. 

Crabbe, George (father of the 
poet), 5, 11, 40. 

Mrs. (mother), 5, 11, 15, 40. 

George (son) , 7, 15, 24, 30, 34, 

35, 42, 46, 53, 58, 60, 69, 71, 74, 
78, 79, 91, 101, 118, 122, 131, 148, 
150, 151, 152, 156, 167, 168, 177, 
185, 195, 196. 

Mrs. (wife) , 7, 8, 13, 57, 58, 

59, 63, 73, 74, 76, 122, 131, 140, 
147, 150. 

John, 60, 92, 122, 150, 155, 

159, 184. 

Edmund, 65. 

William, 71. 

(brother) , 128. 

George (grandson), 177. 

Caroline, 185. 

Critical Review^ 32. 

D 

Daffodils, The (Wordsworth), 182. 

Dejection, Ode to (Coleridge), 132. 

Delay has Danger, 172, 173, 180, 
183. 

De Quincey, 84, 85, 88. 

Deserted Village, The (Gold- 
smith) , 2, 30, 46, 47, 48, 54, 95, 96. 

Diary, Crabbe's, 18-22, 34, 151, 
155, 156. 

Dickens, 99. 

Dodsley (publisher), 19, 32. 

Dora (Tennyson), 198. 

Douglas, George, 200, 201. 

Dunciad (Pope), 10, 21. 

Dunwich, 4. 



Edgeworth, Miss, 103. 
Edinburgh, 185. 



Edinburgh Annual Register, 106. 
Edinburgh Review, 103, 123, 128, 

138, 197. 
Edward Shore, 139-141, 183. 
Elegant Extracts (Vicesimus 

Knox), 54, 146. 
Elegy in a Country Churchyard 

(Gray), 2, 47. 
Ellen, 172. 
Elmy, Miss Sarah. See Crabbe, 

Mrs. (wife). 
English Bards and Scotch Re- 

vieivers (Byron), 113. 
Enoch Arden (Tennyson), 129, 

131. 
Erskine, William, 188, 189. 
Essay on Man (Pope), 10. 
Eustace Grey. See Sir Eustace 

Grey. 
E.vcursion, The (Wordsworth), 

182. 



Felon, the condemned. Descrip- 
tion of, 110. 

Fielding, 103. 

Finden (artist), 197. 

FitzGerald, Edward, 7, 58, 79, 80, 
146, 151, 152, 177, 182, 199, 202. 

William Thomas, 113. 

Fox, Charles James, 38, 47, 73, 93, 
94, 109, 154, 157, 158. 

Henry Richard. See Holland, 

Lord. 

Frank Courtship, The, 142-145. 

Fund, The Literary, 113, 114. 



G 



Gentleman Farmer, The, 138. 
Gentleman's Magazine, 113, 
George IV., 185, 186, 188. 
Glemham, 73, 74, 149. 
Glynn, Dr. Robert, 44. 
Goldsmith, 2, 14, 24, 30, 46, 47, 50, 

51, 95, 99, 104, 146, 183, 202. 
Gordon, Lord George, 22. 



208 



CRABBE 



Gore, Dr. (Bishop of Worcester), 

138, 139, 199. 
Grantham, 64. 
Gray, 2, 14, 24, 47, 183. 

H 

Hall of Justice, The, 90, 92, 175. 
Hampstead, 154, 184, 190. 
Hanmer, Sir Thomas. Memoir 

and Correspondence of, .35. 
Hatchard, John (publisher), 92, 

105, 128. 
Haunted House, The (Hood) , 100. 
Hazlitt, 191, 192. 
Heart of Midlothian, The (Scott) , 

188. 
Henry V. (Shakespeare), 140. 
"Hetty Sorrel," 99. 
Highlanders, 187. 
Hoare family, 154, 155, 184, 190, 

192, 193, 194, 195. 
Hogarth, 133. 
Holland, Lord, 92, 94. 
House ivith the Green Shutters, 

The (George Douglas), 201. 
Huchon, M. (University of 

Nancy), 36. 
Human Life (Rogers), 161. 
Huntingdon, William, 91. 
Hutton, Rev. W. H., 65, 67. 



Inebriety, 9, 11, 25. 

In Memoriam (Tennyson), 141. 

" Isaac Ashford," 101. 



Jeffrey {Edinburgh Revieio), 103, 
120, 123, 124, 128, 138, 139, 140, 
179. 

Johnson, Samuel, 24, 38, 45, 46, 49, 
93, 108, 137, 157, 158. 

Jordan, Mrs. (actress), 55. 

K 



" Kailyard school," 200. 
Keats, 3, 160. 



Kemble, Fanny, 177. 
John, 154. 



Lady Barbara, 169, 172. 

Lady of the Lake, The (Scott) , 106. 

Lamb, Charles, 145, 153. 

Lamia and other Poems (Keats), 

160. 
Lansdowne, Third Marquis of, 154. 
Langhorne (painter), 99. 
Lay of the Last Minstrel, The 

(Scott), 89. 
Lazy Lawrence (Edgeworth) , 103. 
Leadbeater, Mrs., 126, 152, 157, 163, 

171, W). 
Library, The, 29, 32, 35, 38, 55, 92, 

104. 
Literary Society, The, 158. 
Lockhart, 25, 87, 185, 187, 188, 189. 
Longmans (publisher), 158. 
Lothian, Lord, 44. 
Lowell, 177. 

Lover's Journey, The, 13, 131. 
Lyrical Ballads (Wordsworth), 

89. 

M 

Macaulay, 103, 110, 199. 

Maid's Story, The, 180. 

Manners, Lord Robert, 44, 60, 62. 

Maud (Tennyson), 200. 

Memoir of Crabbe. ^See Biography. 

Methodism, 87. 

Miller's Daughter, The (Tenny- 
son), 198. 

Minerva Press, The, 103. 

"Mira,"8, 9, 18,23,24. 

Mitford, Miss, 103. 

Montgomery, Robert, 110. 

Monthly Revieio, 22, 23, 32. 

Moore, Thomas, 157, 158. 

Murillo, 202. 

Murray, John (publisher), 3, 31, 
154, 158, 159, 161, 163, 186, 190, 196. 

Muston (Leicestershire), 64, 65, 
147, 148. 



INDEX 



209 



N 
Neio Monthhj, 16, 38. 
Newman, Cardinal, 139, 199. 
Neiospaper, The, 62, 63, 92. 
Nineteenth Century, 121. 
North, Mr. Dudley, 16, 21, 72, 77, 
92 94. 

Lord, 21, 29. 

Novels in Crabbe's day, 103, 104. 

O 
Omar Elhayyam, 177. 
Opium eating, 80, 82, 84, 85, 88. 
Our Village (Miss Mitford), 103. 



Pains of Sleep (Coleridge), 89. 

Parents' Assistant, The (Edge- 
worth), 103. 

Parham, 7, 8, 57, 59, 66, 71, 73, 
149. 

Parish Register, The, 46, 47, 73, 
75, 77, 78, 90, 92, 94^107, 108, 
123, 179. 

Parting Hour, The, 128-131. 

Patron, The, 43, 135-137. 

Phillips (artist), 197. 

" Phoebe Dawson," 94, 99. 

Pluralities, 56, 77. 

Poacher, The (Scott), 106. 

Poor, State relief of, 121. 

Pope, 2, 6, 10, 22, 24, 30, 99, 104, 
125. 

Posthumous Poems, 190. 

Pretyman, Bishop, 77. 

Priest, Description of Parish, 52. 

Progress of Error (Cowper) , 53. 

Pucklechurch, 185, 195. 

Q 

Quarterly Review, 123, 124, 125, 

197. 
Queensberry, Duke of, 44. 

R 

Raleigh, 6. 

Reform Bill Riots, 194. 
p 



Rejected Addresses (Smith), 115. 

Rendham, 77, 78. 

RejTiolds, Sir Joshua, 30, 38, 45, 

55, 93. 
Richardson (novelist), 181, 182. 
Ridout, Miss Charlotte, 152. 
Riots, Gordon, 21, 193; Bristol, 

194. 
Rogers, Samuel, 154, 157, 158, 159, 

161, 183, 191. 
Rokeby (Scott), 107. 
Romilly, Sir Samuel, 168. 
Ruskin, 202. 
Ruth, 172. 

Rutland, Duke of, 41, 44, 55, 57, 
64, 148. 

S 
Scott, Sir Walter, 3, 25, 28, 64, 87, 

104, 105. 106, 107, 160, 179, 199. 
Seasons, The (Thomson) , 47. 
Sellers, Miss Edith, 121. 
Shackleton, Edward, 54. 
Shakespeare, 6, 128. 
Shelburne, Lord, lines to, 21. 
Shelley, 3. 
Siddous, Mrs., 55. 
Simple Susan (Edgeworth), 103. 
Sir Eustace Grey, 80, 88, 90, 92, 

175. 
Sisters, The, 172, 176. 
Smith, James {Rejected Ad- 
dresses), 115, 116, 122. 
Smollett, 103. 

Smugglers and Poachers, 168, 172. 
Solitary Reaper, The (Words- 
worth), 182. 
Southey, 33, 74, 146, 147, 184, 191. 
Spenser, 6. 

Spirit of the Age (Hazlitt), 191. 
Stanfield, Clarkson, 197. 
Stathern (Leicestershire), 60, 61, 

63. 
Stephen, Sir Leslie, 181, 199. 
Stothard (painter), 44. 
Sweffling (Suffolk), 73. 
Swift, 24. 
Swinburne, 199. 



210 



CRABBE 



Table Talk (Cowper) , 53. 
Tales, 124, 126-145, 146, 147, 150. 
Tales of the Hall, 3, 155, 158, 160, 

161, 163-183, 190. 
Tennyson, 118, 141, 180, 198, 199. 

Frederick, 177. 

Thomson, 14, 47, 104. 

Thurlow, Lord, 21, 39, 41, 56, 60, 

62, 64. 
Tomlins, Dr. See Pre ty man. 
To veil family , 7, 8, 13, 41, 57, 59, m. 
Traveller, The (Goldsmith) , 30, 46. 
Trollope, Anthony, 155, 156. 
Trowbridge, 148, 150, 153, 155, 184. 
Turner, Rev. Richard, 73, 76, 94, 

109. 

V 
Village, The, 2, 29, 32, 44, 45, 48, 

53, 55, 59, 62, 90, 92, 93, 104, 

158,178. 



W 

Walker, Frederick (artist), 99. 
Watson, Bishop, 44, 56. 
Waverley (Scott), 107. 
Wesley, 65, 68, 88. 
Wesleyan Movement, 68, 91. 
Westall, Richard (artist), 190. 
Whitelield Revival, 68. 
Widoiv's Tale, The, 59. 
Wife's Trial, The (Lamb) , 145. 
Wilkie, 133. 
Wolfe, 23. 

Woodbridge, 7, 8, 14. 
Wordsworth, 1-3, 84, 89, 139, 155, 

157, 160, 172, 179, 180, 181, 182, 

183, 184, 191, 199. 
World of Dreams, The, 80, 88, 90. 



Young, 96. 



ENGLISH MEN OF LETTERS 



EDITED BY 

JOHN MORLEY 



Cloth. i2mo. Price, 40 cents, each 



ADDISON. By W. J. Courthope. 
BACON. By R. W. Church. 
BENTLEY. By Prof. Jebb. 
BUNYAN. By J. A. Froude. 
BURKE. By John Morley. 
BURNS. By Principal Shairp. 
BYRON. By Prof. Nichol. 
CARLYLE. By Prof. Nichol. 
CHAUCER. By Prof. A. W. Ward. 
COLERIDGE. By H. D. Traill. 
COWPER. By Goldwin Smith. 
DEFOE. By W. Minto. 
DE QUINCEY. By Prof. Masson. 
DICKENS. ByA. W.Ward. 
DRYDEN. By G. Saintsbury. 
FIELDING. By Austin Dobson. 
GIBBON. By J. Cotter Morison. 
GOLDSMITH. By William Black. 
GRAY. By Edmund Gosse. 
HUME. By T. H. Huxley. 
JOHNSON. By Leslie Stephen. 



KEATS. By Sidney Colvin. 
LAMB. By Alfred Ainger. 
LANDOR. By Sidney Colvia. 
LOCKE. By Prof. Fowler. 
MACAULAY. 

By J. Cotter Morison. 
MILTON. By Mark Pattison. 
POPE. By Leslie Stephen. 
SCOTT. By R. H. Hutton. 
SHELLEY. By J. A. Symonds. 
SHERIDAN. By Mrs. Oliphant. 
SIR PHILIP SIDNEY. 

By J. A. Symonds. 
SOUTHEY. By Prof. Dowden. 
SPENSER. By R. W. Church. 
STERNE. By H. D. Traill. 
SWIFT. By Leslie Stephen. 
THACKERAY. By A. Trollope. 
WORDSWORTH. 

By F. W. H. Myers. 



NEW VOLUMES 



Cloth. i2mo. Price, 75 cents net , 
GEORGE ELIOT. By Leslie Stephen. 

WILLIAM HAZLITT. By Augustine Birrell. 

MATTHEW ARNOLD. By Herbert W. Paul. 
JOHN RUSKIN. By Frederic Harrison. 
JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER. By Thomas W. Higginson. 
ALFRED TENNYSON. By Alfred Lyall. 

SAMUEL RICHARDSON. By Austin Dobson. 
ROBERT BROWNING. By G. K. Chesterton. 
CRABBE. By Alired Ainger. 



ENGLISH MEN OF LETTERS 

EDITED BY 

JOHN MORLEY 
THREE BIOGRAPHIES IN EACH VOLUME 



Cloth. i2mo. Price, $i.oo, each 



CHAUCER. By Adolphus William Ward. SPENSER. By R. W. 

Church. DRYDEN. By George Saintsbury. 
MILTON. By Mark Pattison, B.D. GOLDSMITH. By William 

Black. COWPER. By Goldwin Smith. 
BYRON. By John Nichol. SHELLEY. By John Addington 

Symonds. KEATS. By Sidney Colvin, M.A. 
WORDSWORTH. By F. W. H. Myers. SOUTHEY. By Edward 

Dowden. LANDOR. By Sidney Colvin, M.A. 
LAMB. By Alfred Ainger. ADDISON. By W. J. Courthope. 

SWIFT. By Leslie Stephen. 
SCOTT. By Richard H. Hutton. BURNS. By Principal Shairp. 

COLERIDGE. By H. D. Traill. 
HUME. By T. H. Huxley, F.R.S. LOCKE. By Thomas Fowler. 

BURKE. By John Morley. 
FIELDING. By Austin Dobson. THACKERAY. By Anthony 

Trollope. DICKENS. By Adolphus William Ward. 
GIBBON. By J. Cotter Morison. CARLYLE. By John Nichol. 

MACAULAY. By J. Cotter Morison. 
SIDNEY. By J. A. Symonds. DE QUINCEY. By David Masson. 

SHERIDAN. By Mrs. Oliphant. 
POPE. By Leslie Stephen. JOHNSON. By Leslie Stephen. 

GRAY. By Edmund Gosse. 
BACON. By R. W. Church. BUNYAN. By J. A. Froude. 

BENTLEY. By R. C. Jebb. 



PUBLISHED BY 

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

66 FIFTH AVENUE. NEW YORK 



SEP 11 1903 



